Читать книгу A Gift from Nessus - William McIlvanney - Страница 9

3

Although the fog might have seemed an adequate safeguard in itself, Cameron adhered scrupulously to the complicated rules he had evolved for visiting Margaret’s flat. This evening, as always, he parked the car a couple of streets away from where Margaret lived, but not in the same place as he had left it the time before. He had four habitual parking spots and he permutated them moodily. Having locked the car, he went in the opposite direction from his destination.

It was a compulsive performance with him and, like most rites, was not quite rational. The dread of leaving the car two nights running in the one place had the strength of a taboo over him, as if such carelessness would bring discovery inevitably upon him. And the erratic course he took towards Margaret’s flat was not designed simply to foil the rubber soles of followers or elude the eyes of passers-by. For him it had almost the power of a spell, woven by his own feet, and proof against more than mere people. It was as if by pacing out a deliberately devious route he could shake off his sense of guilt, give his own conscience the slip, and create a charmed context for his meeting with Margaret, a private room that excluded the fears that scuttled in the cupboards of his mind, the shame that snuffled to get at him in his sleep. This evening especially he needed such a secret place to be, a shelter from drab realities.

The fog did its best to countermand the hardness of the truth, touching the gaunt dullness of the buildings with a brief, grey mystery. Cameron was glad of it, although he knew what lay beneath it well enough. This part of Glasgow was tucked and folded in his heart like a map of himself. Since he had known Margaret, it had taken hold of him with that relentlessness places have. Pointless images from it formed insistent lumber in his memory – the house in the corner sporting the potted plant whose leaves reached wanly after growth that never came; the newsagent’s window where handwritten postcards advertising rooms made illegible offers in the rain. That grubby plexus of streets formed a knot that tied him somehow to himself, meant more than masonry, so that sometimes in a dream he was running down one of those streets away from something, but found that one street doubled back endlessly into another, while around him rose the familiar tall black buildings where the starlings alighted to defecate in cheeky insult to the architecture.

But tonight the fog helped him to generate the atmosphere he wanted, neutralising time and place. He was amoeba swimming through a grey infinity. For the time that he was with Margaret, there would only be two people in a room and nothing else would matter. Someone lurched past him greyly, drowning in his own dream.

The light in the entry burned stale on the dank walls. As soon as Cameron’s foot clanged on the cold stone floor, the small dream he was nurturing died on him. This dim corridor admitted no deviation from the fact itself, led to nothing more than the bleak stairway at the end of it. On the two doors he passed, unknown names were dissolving in polished brass.

Margaret lived in one of the top flats, three storeys up. The stairs had been hollowed down the middle by a river of feet, and greasespots showed here and there like domesticated bloodstains. Behind one of the doors as he went by, an argument raged faintly; the words, audible but incomprehensible, made small explosions of futility. He opened the door to Margaret’s flat with his key and went in.

‘Oh. Eddie. Hullo,’ she said.

She was genuinely surprised to see him. Obviously she had assumed it was too late now for him to come today. There was a pile of jotters on the arm of her chair and she had a red pen in her hand, marking. She must have taken a very early tea. Cameron was embarrassed to see the tea-dishes still on the table and the fire not cleaned out, grey ash showing round the edges of the electric heater she had placed in the hearth. All that sloppiness was somehow like advertising her loneliness, seemed to be saying: See, nobody cares. She hadn’t even drawn the curtains.

‘I can’t wait long,’ Cameron said.

At once he was angry with himself for saying that. It was unnecessarily brutal, so much more clumsy than the deft scene of mutual seduction that he had imagined. Margaret said nothing but her eyes were a reprimand he could hardly bear, like small wounds. Within himself he felt a response stir like a small haemorrhage, and the thing that bled in him was a complex tissue of shame and lust and hunger and pity.

‘I’ve just been doing some correction.’

Margaret put the words between them like a screen until she could find herself, separate her thoughts from irregular French verbs. She stood up, gathered the jotters together and laid them on the floor beside her open briefcase.

‘The fog slowed me down a bit.’

‘Yes. It would. I think it’ll lift soon, though.’

She was hesitant a moment in the middle of the room before she went to the window and drew the curtains. In taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chair, Cameron became vulnerable, like a tortoise without its shell. The white shirt-sleeves seemed ridiculous, a symbol of domesticity that was out of context here. The anonymity of the room swamped him. The bulb that hung from its fraying flex was shadeless, giving off the dull, cold light that seems to be stored in the waiting-rooms of railway stations. The whole place gave a sense of being in transit. Books were piled in several places, and two of them lay open, as if they had been abandoned by people in a hurry. On the arm of Margaret’s chair was a half-eaten biscuit. The wallpaper was ancient, and parts of its motif asserted themselves here and there, like graffiti.

Cameron found himself wondering what he was doing in this room, and what he and this woman drawing curtains had in common. Margaret didn’t help to make the situation seem more natural. She crossed awkwardly from the window to the fireplace and became preoccupied in a contest with her own untidiness. She lifted an empty cup from the hearth and put it on the mantlepiece, as if that was where it belonged. She took the jotters from the chair and placed them neatly on the floor beside it. Trapped in her own chaos like a complicated chess problem, all she could do was shift the fragments of it around into different patterns, searching vaguely for some way out.

The particles of her confusion seemed to settle like dust on Cameron, fouling his taste for this moment. He had an impulse to put his jacket back on and get out for good, leaving his key on the table, as if this room was a locker he had no further use for. It was hopeless for him too, he suddenly realised. He was like Margaret, forever pushing the refuse of his life from one place to another, as if it made a difference. He had been coming to this room for over a year now, and yet he felt it was pointless. Every time he turned his key in the lock, his own shame and self-deception fell out on him, smothering him. It was as if he kept his relationship with Margaret locked up in this room, like luggage he was always just about to use. But he hadn’t used it so far. He came back from time to time to check that it was still in the same place and still available to him. But he wasn’t sure he had the guts to take it any further. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Almost every morning, he woke into the same question: would he do it? Would he ever break with Allison and go to Margaret? Emotionally, he lived each day with his case packed in the hall. All he had to do was save enough resolution to buy a ticket. But it only needed Alice to cut her finger or Helen to touch his hand with questions, and he was robbed of resolution. It would be more honest just to leave now, and for good.

But turning from the fireplace, Margaret showed him her face in familiar half-profile, the high forehead, the straight nose, the large mouth, the brown eyes that went opaque with secret thoughts, the dark hair in which even this light found veins of sudden amber. He inventoried her features painfully, like a clerk recording someone else’s wealth.

‘I wanted to come tonight,’ he said. ‘I had to see you.’

It was spoken like a recrimination.

‘I’m glad you did.’

‘It’s been some day. What a day! Disaster day.’ He wanted to give all the tawdry weariness of it to her, as if she could expunge it.

‘I know what you mean. It’s been like that for me too. But you’ve salvaged some of it for me.’

‘You were going to do some work?’

‘That doesn’t matter. The past participles can wait. How long have you got?’

‘Not very long. I’m going out tonight. We’re going out. With friends. Damn them.’

‘At least you’re here.’

‘I wish I could stay.’

‘I wish you could.’

A small hammer of blood tapped at Cameron’s temple. They stood in mute commiseration with each other, reluctant to give more. They had fed that demanding pain that grew out of their mutual presence, dropped a few words into it, and the jaws of it only widened. Taut and painfully dignified they waited for it to swallow them, transcending the little drabness of the place. Formally, solemnly, quietly, like someone articulating the first words of a ceremony, Cameron spoke.

‘I want you,’ he said and, walking over, flicked the switch, erasing the room.

The place seemed to roar with darkness. They found themselves clumsily in the dark, their fingers relearning each other’s bodies in frantic braille. Unskilfully, Cameron released Margaret from her dress, patches of skin blooming palely. She keened slightly, the sound a minute descant to the muffled traffic of the city.

‘Love me, love me, love me,’ Margaret said, and the words swam weakly through her breathing. ‘Take me through, take me through.’

They moved across the dark room like some impossible animal that had wandered out of prehistory. In the bedroom the curtains had not been drawn, and the fog washed on the window-pane, making the room seem to drift in a heaving void. Cameron felt angry at his clothes for shackling the urgency of his desire with the ludicrousness of trousers, the mundanity of laces. As he lay down beside Margaret, lust sprang her like a trap.

‘I wish there could be more,’ she was saying. ‘Why can’t we be together?’

‘I love you,’ offering the words as if they were some sort of absolution. Then he gagged her mouth with his.

Beyond the moilings of their bodies, the city churned and hooted faintly like a factory, busily engaged in manufacturing their futures, making arrangements, constructing situations, precipitating choices. Again Margaret made to speak, but Cameron smothered her words, for her voice gave access to the needs that waited for him to finish, illumined the faces that watched him from the darkness of his own head. Allison, their children, Morton, the young man. Inexplicably, one irrelevant thought hovered over him like a vulture, waiting to glut on the guilt of his exhaustion: was this Allison’s day for going to Elmpark? He wondered if it was. He hoped it wasn’t. Somehow, that would make his action worse.

But he drove that thought off with all the others, repelling it with the force of his involvement. He mined desperately at her body, as if he could transmute them both into something different and escape what waited for them, or could admit them to some small, private eternity, while the luminous dial that burned like a cancer on his wrist kept an ironic record of his efforts.