Читать книгу Walking Wounded - William McIlvanney - Страница 10

3

On the sidelines

British Summer Time had officially begun but, if you didn’t have a diary, you might not have noticed. The few people standing around in the Dean Park under a smirring rain didn’t seem to be convinced. They knew the clocks had been put forward an hour – that was what enabled these early evening football matches to take place. But the arbitrary human decision to make the nights lighter hadn’t outwitted the weather. The Scottish climate still had its stock of rain and frost and cold snaps to be used up before the summer came, assuming it did.

Two football pitches were in use. On one of them a works’ game was in progress. On the adjoining pitch two Boys’ Brigade teams were playing. Standing between touchlines, John Hannah, his coat collar up, paid most attention to the Boys’ Brigade game – he was here to see Gary – but the works’ match, so noisy and vigorous and expletive, was impossible to ignore. It impinged on the comparative decorum of the boys’ game like the future that was coming to them, no matter what precepts of behaviour the Company Leaders tried to impose on them. John had heard some of the other parents complaining ostentatiously at half-time about the inadvisability of booking a pitch beside a works’ game. ‘After all, it’s an organisation to combat evil influences, not arrange to give them a hearing,’ a woman in a blue antartex coat and jodhpurs and riding-boots had said. Presumably the horse was a white charger.

John found the contrast between the games instructive. It was like being sandwiched between two parts of his past. The works’ game was an echo of his own origins. He had himself played in games like that often enough. Standing so close to the crunch of bone on bone, the thud of bodies, the force of foot striking ball, he remembered what a physically hard game football is. Watching it from a grandstand, as he had so often lately, you saw it bowdlerised a little, refined into an aesthetic of itself. The harshness of it made him wonder if that was why he hadn’t pursued the game as determinedly as his talent might have justified. He hoped that wasn’t the reason but lately the sense of other failures had made him quest back for some root, one wrong direction taken that had led on to all the others. He had wondered if he had somehow always been a quitter, and his refusal to take football seriously as a career had come back to haunt him.

Three separate people whose opinions he respected had told him he could be a first-class professional footballer. The thought of that had sustained him secretly at different times of depression for years, like an option still open, and it was only fairly recently that he had forced himself to throw away the idea out of embarrassment. He was forty now. For years the vague dream of playing football had been like a man still taking his teddy-bear to bed with him. He might still occasionally mention what had been said to him but, whereas before he had named the three men and sometimes described the games after which they had said it, now the remark had eroded to a self-deprecating joke: ‘A man once told me . . . At least I think that’s what he said – I couldn’t be sure because his guide-dog was barking a lot at the time’. The joke, like a lot of jokes, was a way of controlling loss.

‘Oh, well done, Freddie!’ the woman in the jodhpurs whinnied.

John supposed that Freddie was her son. The kind of parents who attended these games were inclined to see one player in sharp focus and twenty-one meaningless blurs, as if parenthood had fitted their eyes with special lenses. What Freddie had done was to mis-head the ball straight up into the air so that it fell at the feet of an opponent. It had to be assumed that the expression of admiration that was torn involuntarily from the mouth of Freddie’s mother was due to the surprising height, about thirty feet, the ball had achieved by bouncing off Freddie’s head. Freddie’s mother was apparently not scouting for one of the senior clubs.

Gary, John decided after applying rigorous rules of non-favouritism to his judgment, was playing quite well. At ten, he had already acquired basic ball control and he wasn’t quite as guilty as most of them were of simply following the ball wherever it went, as if they were attached to it by ropes of different lengths. John had been following Gary’s games religiously all season, as a way of showing him that he was still very much involved in his life though he might not live in the same house, and the matches had acquired the poignancy of a weekly recital for John, a strange orchestration of his past and his present and his uncertain future.

The movingness was an interweave of many things. Part of it was memory. A municipal football park in Scotland is a casually haunted place, a grid of highly sensitised earth that is ghosted by urgent treble voices and lost energy and small, fierce dreams. John’s dreams had flickered for years most intensely in such places. He could never stand for long watching Gary and these other boys without a lost, wandering pang from those times finding a brief home in him. On countless winter mornings he had stood beside parks like this and remembered his own childhood commitment and wondered what had made so many Scottish boys so desperate to play this game. He could understand the physical joy of children playing football in a country like Brazil. But on a Saturday morning after a Friday night with too much to drink (and since the separation, every Friday night seemed to end that way), he had turned up to watch Gary and stood, peeled with cold, feeling as if the wind was playing his bones like a xylophone, and seen children struggle across a pitch churned to a treacle of mud. In five minutes they wore claylike leggings, the ball had become as heavy as a cannonball and the wind purpled their thighs. He remembered one touching moment when a goalkeeper had kicked the ball out and then, as the wind blew it back without anyone else touching it, had to dive dramatically to save his own goal-kick.

‘Four-two-four! Four-two-four!’ Gary’s Company Leader shouted, as if he was communicating.

It was part of the current professional jargon relating to the formation in which a football team should play. Even applied to the professional game, it was, in John’s opinion, the imposition of sterile theory upon the most creatively fluid ball-game in the world. Hurled peremptorily at a group of dazed and innocent ten-year-olds, it was as rational as hitting an infant who is dreaming over the head with a copy of The Interpretation of Dreams. The words depressed John.

They struck another plangent and familiar chord in his experience of these games. Everything was changing. Week by week, he had been learning the extent of his own failed dreams. Gary had run about so many wintry fields like the vanishing will o’ the wisp of John’s former expectations, moving remorselessly further and further away from him. He had already virtually lost Carole. She was her mother’s daughter, had chosen which side she was on. She would tolerate the times he took them out but, even so young, she had evolved her own discreet code for making their relationship quite formal, like invariably turning her head fractionally when he bent to kiss her, so that her hair on his lips was for him the taste of rejection. Lying in his bed at night, he used to wonder what her mother was telling her about him.

Gary was more supportive. He didn’t take sides but when he was with his father he came to him openly, interested in what was happening in his life and concerned to share as much of his own as he could. Yet, in spite of himself, even Gary made John feel excluded – not just because there was so much time when he couldn’t be with him but also because, during the times that they were together, it was as if they were speaking in subtly different dialects. Like a parent who has sent his child to elocution lessons, John felt slightly alienated by the gifts he had tried to give Gary.

The football games had come to encapsulate the feeling for John. They were where he had been as a boy and they were a significantly different place. He had acquired his close-dribbling skills and the sudden, killing acceleration in street kickabouts and scratch games under Peeweep Hill where as many as thirty might be playing in one game. He had practised for hours in the house with a ball made of rolled up newspapers tied with string. He had owned his first pair of football boots when he was fifteen.

‘Put a pea in yer bloody whistle, ref,’ one of the works’ team players bellowed.

‘Pull your stocking up, Freddie,’ the jodhpurs sang.

And John’s past and his son’s future met in his head and failed to mate. The game wasn’t for Gary what it had been for John, a fierce and secret romanticism that fed itself on found scraps – an amazing goal scored and kept pressed in the mind like a perfect rose – a passionate refusal to believe in the boring pragmatism of the conventional authority his teachers represented, a tunnel that ran beneath the crowds of the commonplace and would one day open into a bowl of sunlight and bright grass and the roar of adulation. For Gary it was something you did for the time being, an orderly business of accepted rules and laundered strips and football boots renewed yearly. He could take it or leave it. In a year or two, he would probably leave it. He was starting to play tennis.

John felt in some ways younger than his son. Gary was learning sensible rules of living. Somehow, John never had. The romanticism he had failed to fulfil through football had dogged him all his life. He had tried to smother it in the practicalities of living, had allowed his marriage to close round it like a mausoleum. Katherine, acquisitively middle-class, had overlaid the vagueness of his dreams with the structure of her ambitions. Because of her, they had moved from the flat to the old semi-detached house to the new detached house they couldn’t afford, with a mortgage so destructive of every other possibility but the meeting of its terms that sometimes, coming home to his name on the door, he had felt like Dracula pulling the coffin-lid down on himself before a new dawn had a chance to break. Because of Katherine, he had moved out of the factory to be an agent. Though he had come to hate the job, he was still doing it. He hated agreeing with opinions he found unacceptable. He hated the smiles he clamped on his face going into places. He lived most days between two dreads, the dread of having to fake himself and the dread that it would stop being fakery, that he would get out of bed some morning and there would be no act to put on with his pin-stripe suit. The act would be him.

Finding that Katherine was involved with somebody else had been a kind of bitter relief, since he had been doing the same. The result had been less recrimination than admission of an already accomplished fact. They were finished. They were like two actors who had, unknown to each other, secretly contracted out of a long-running play in which neither believed any more. For both, the new involvements hadn’t lasted long.

The affairs had happened not so much for their own sakes as to provide ways of denying their marriage. Once that was denied, John had had to confront the continuing reality of his romanticism. He didn’t want a career, he didn’t want a big house, he didn’t want stability. He wanted a grand passion, he wanted a relationship so real, so intense that it would sustain him till he died.

It was perhaps that rediscovery of himself, the resurgence of vague longings in him that had made him part from Katherine with a grand, flamboyant gesture: He had simply walked out of the house with nothing more than two suitcases and his collection of jazz records. At thirty-seven he went romantically back out into the world with aspirations as foggy as an adolescent’s, some changes of clothes, and records for which he had no record-player. He left the house (in joint names), the car (he had the firm’s car), every stick of furniture, the dog, the cat. Only the children he saw as remaining from his unsuccessful pretence of being someone else. And even there the grandeur of his mood had refused to descend to petty specifications. He had made no stipulations about access. Katherine had never tried to stop him seeing them. They were blood of his blood, he always thought. What could a piece of paper and some legal jargon do to alter that?

That day, struggling along the street to where the car was parked away from the house, with his two suitcases and his jazz records in two plastic bags he was praying wouldn’t give at the handles, he had felt a great elation. The house lay behind him like a discarded uniform. He wasn’t who they had all thought he was. He was a mystery, even to himself. He would be defined by her. Her, wherever she was. Since his teens, lying in bed at night, he had seen her dimly from time to time, as behind a veil, an ectoplasm of limbs, a floating, half-glimpsed smile like a butterfly in moonlight. It was time to take off the veil, to touch the solidity of her presence. He felt as dedicated as a medieval knight. Where would his journey take him?

It took him first of all to 53 Gillisland Road. He rented a single room with a gas-fire that worked on a coin-meter, a papered ceiling which looked as if somebody had started to strip it and then grown bored, a single bed and a moquette suite so larded with the past that John wondered if the settee had doubled as a dinner table. There was a shared kitchen, a shared lavatory. There were in another room two boys from the Western Isles who sang in Gaelic when they were drunk, which appeared to be every night. Their names emerged, from midnight meetings in the kitchen to make coffee, as Calum and Fraser. They were full of oblique jokes only understood by each other, like a touring vaudeville team who hadn’t yet adjusted to the local sense of humour. There was Andrew Finlay, a fifty-five-year-old recent divorcee with a cough that preceded him everywhere like a town-crier. He still couldn’t believe what had happened to him. He was given to knocking at doors throughout the evening until he found someone who could confirm for him that he was really there. John became a frequent victim and had learned to dread that cough, like the lead mourner bringing in his wake the funeral for himself that was Andrew Finlay. There were others who remained no more to John than the same song played again and again or a flushing cistern. The house had once been the sort of place Katherine had always wanted and then it had fallen on hard times and been divided into bedsits, so that John felt he had become a lodger in his own past.

It wasn’t a happy thought. But he decided that the seediness of his present, ironic in relation to his shimmering mirage of the future, was only temporary. His present was the frog. Come the kiss . . . But he didn’t seek it promiscuously. The strength of his romanticism lay in not devaluing the dream. Only once in the three years or more they had been apart had he become seriously involved with a woman, wondered if at last this was the one.

Sally Galbraith worked in one of the offices he visited. She was in her thirties, divorced, with a daughter. She had luxuriant brown hair, gentle eyes and quite marvellous breasts. But it was her smile that had brought her into sharp focus out of the crowd scene that was his thoughts about women. The smile was quite unlike most of the smiles that met him on his rounds – ‘do not disturb’ signs hung on the mouth while, behind them, the eyes went on with private business. The smile was disturbingly genuine. It was attached to the eyes and seemed personal to him. He felt they were sharing something, an immediate rapport. It was as if he knew her already, but he managed not to say that.

‘You’re new,’ he said instead, and didn’t feel it was much more dashingly original.

‘Am I? I don’t feel as if I am.’

He liked that.

‘I would’ve remembered you.’

‘I’ve just started.’

‘Who do I call you?’

‘Sally.’

‘John.’

He had carried that conversation around with him all day and taken it back at night to his room in Gillisland Road and opened it up and made a meal of it, like a Chinese carry-out. It might have seemed dull on the outside but the secret ingredients were exactly to the taste of his loneliness, all piquant implication and succulent innuendo. Like a gastronome of small talk, he knew exactly what it was made of.

Incredibly enough, he had proved right. On each subsequent visit, the more he assumed the more his assumptions were welcomed. In a month he had asked her out to dinner. He took things slowly. He didn’t want the route taken to mar the view he imagined of the arrival. Like someone learning as much as he can about the country to which he wants to emigrate, John studied Sally carefully at meals, on visits to the pictures, in pubs, on walks. He came to know the bleakness of her marriage, interchangeable with a lot of other people’s, the fact that she hadn’t been with a man in a long time. He met her daughter, Christine, a nine-year-old with a disconcerting habit of talking to her mother as if he wasn’t there. He became familiar with the house, a flat with a lot of hanging plants (Sally had done a night class in macramé). Meanwhile, Sally had been taking lessons in John’s past.

The night they graduated to bodies seemed to happen by mutual agreement. They had been eating out and were sitting chatting at the end of a good meal when they touched hands and knew at once what both of them wanted for afters. The waiter suggested liqueurs but John settled the bill and they went straight to Sally’s flat. The baby-sitter was watching a serial. They had a drink and began to regret their patience in moving towards this moment. John wondered if it was an omnibus edition of the serial. As the baby-sitter was eventually leaving, Christine got out of bed to discuss what she would have to take to school the next day for P.E. There was some doubt, apparently, about whether they would be in the gymnasium or outside.

When Christine went back to her room and while they waited to make sure she was asleep, they kissed and touched each other in delicious preparation. Sally’s body was such an exciting place for his hands to wander in and her mouth felt so capable of swallowing his tongue that John was glad of the drinks he had had. He thought they would slow down his reactions nicely. It had been some time now since he had made love and he didn’t want to be finished before they had started.

Sally broke away from him and went through to check on Christine. Coming back, she stood in the doorway with her mouth slightly open. She nodded.

‘She sleeps through anything,’ Sally said. John came across to her and they led each other clumsily through to the bedroom.

The room was a fully furnished annexe of John’s dreams. The lighting was from one heavily shaded lamp and it seeped a soft, blueish glow into the room. ‘The Blue Grotto’, John’s mind offered from somewhere, like homage. In the light the yellow walls seemed insubstantial. The bed, with the duvet pulled back, was fawn and inviting.

As they undressed, Sally said, ‘I’m sorry about the Wendy House’.

In his feverish preoccupation, John couldn’t understand what she meant. He thought at first that it might be a code expression. He wondered bizarrely if she was euphemistically telling him that her period was here. Then he lost his balance slightly taking off a sock and, turning as he steadied himself, he saw the cardboard structure against the wall. Sally was talking about a real Wendy House.

‘There’s nowhere else to put it,’ she said. ‘If we put it in Christine’s bedroom, it fills the room.’

He didn’t mind. It was certainly incongruous here, as if a femme fatale were discovered playing with her dolls. But in a way it added to the moment, he convinced himself – like making love in a fairy story. He was naked. Sally was naked. The beauty of her breasts owed nothing to the brassiere manufacturers. He approached and touched them, awestruck, as if he had found the holy grail twice. They embraced and fell in luxurious slow motion on to the bed, Sally on top. A part of his mind, like an accountant at an orgy, carefully recorded that she must have had the electric blanket on for some time. It was like making love in hot sand.

Everything went right. In the arrogance of his formidable erection, John knew that he was the scriptwriter for this scene. They passed through their initial clumsiness into a sweet harmony of movements, hands, mouths, legs moving as if they were part of the same being. When he went into her, she smiled with her mouth wide open and said, ‘Oh yes, yes, yes’. He was above her now and they were moving towards a meeting he knew he could arrange to the moment.

Then there was a hammering at the outside door, rather as if a yeti were paying a call. With a hand on either side of her head, John paused and looked down at her and shook his head masterfully. He was renewing his purpose when the hammering came again and he heard the letter-box being lifted.

‘Sally!’

It sounded as if a Friesian bull had been taking a language course.

‘Sally! Ah know ye’re in there!’

The expression on Sally’s face was like an ice-pack applied to John’s scrotum. It was the kind of look the heroine gives in a horror film when she knows the monster has her trapped.

‘Oh shite!’ Sally said.

‘Sally! Open this door! If ye don’t want it landin’ in the middle of yer loabby.’

‘Ignore him,’ John suggested unconvincingly.

‘I can’t, I can’t,’ Sally said.

John could see her point. It would have been like trying to ignore a hurricane as it blew you away. They had pulled apart from each other now and his penis, treacherous comrade, was already going into hiding. No fun, no me, it seemed to be saying. Suddenly, the atmosphere was that of an air-raid. They stared at each other, paralysed. When they spoke, they found they were whispering.

‘Who is he?’ John mouthed, as if they had time for biographical notes.

‘Sally!’

‘Alec Manson. He’s stone mad.’

The news didn’t encourage John in the plan he had been vaguely forming – to pull on his trousers and go to the door. It occurred to him that if Alec Manson happened to be shouting through the letter-box at the time John would probably be blown back along the hall. His nakedness felt very naked.

‘What does he do!’ John whispered, not sure himself why he was asking. Was he thinking of pulling rank?

‘He’s a bouncer in “The Barley Bree Bar”.’

John’s eyes disappeared briefly under his eyelids. It was roughly equivalent to being told that Alec Manson charged a pack of dingoes protection money. John had only been in ‘The Barley Bree’ twice in his life and he tended to talk of the occasions the way an explorer might talk about the Amazon Basin. It was regarded as being the roughest pub in Graithnock and that made it very rough. ‘If you don’t have ten previous convictions, ye’re barred,’ someone had once told him. But, he told himself, a man’s got to offer to do what a man’s terrified to do.

‘You want me to see about this?’ he quavered quietly.

‘Ah can see a light in there!’ the voice was announcing to the immediate neighbourhood. ‘There’s somebody in there.’

‘Oh my God, no!’

The panic the thought had engendered in Sally would have been unflattering in another situation. Here, with the guardian of ‘The Barley Bree’ sending his voice along the hall like a flame-thrower, it seemed no more than a perfectly reasonable response, confirmation of the obvious.

‘Right! We can do it the easy way or the hard way! With a handle or without a handle! Ah’m countin tae ten! One!’

It wasn’t the kind of accomplishment you would have expected a voice like that to have but they couldn’t just wait there and see if he got stuck at seven. They scrabbled from the bed, moving in quite a few directions at once. The room became a flurry of movement without progress, as if they were caught in a film being run backwards and forwards at the wrong speed.

Sally ran naked to the bedroom door and then ran back. John bent down and put on a sock.

‘Two!’

Sally plumped one pillow, dented the other. Some desperate plan seemed to be forming in her mind.

‘Three!’

As John bent down to pick up his clothes, Sally shoved them under the bed with her foot on her way to pick up the Laura Ashley nightdress that was draped across a wickerwork chair.

‘Four!’

‘Hey!’ John hissed. Sally’s head, emerging from the neck of the nightdress was shaking vigorously as she stared, wild-eyed, at John. ‘No time!’ she screamed silently.

‘Five!’

Sally smoothed down her nightdress, made a couple of meaningless passes at the duvet. She turned to see John whirling in the middle of the floor, as if he had chosen this moment to practise miming a dervish.

‘Six!’

Sally pointed at the Wendy House, pushed John towards it. He looked at her. She opened the cardboard door and jabbed her finger ferociously at the interior several times. He couldn’t believe it.

‘Seven!’

He believed it. He crouched inside while Sally closed the door on him. He heard her sprint across the bedroom and then, at the door, begin to walk along the hall.

‘Alec?’

Her voice sounded so sleepy. The other voice had started to say ‘eight’ and trailed off. To John, huddled in his Wendy House, the blue tinge of the light had taken on a sinister quality, moonscape, jowls of the dead.

‘Alec? Is that you, Alec?’

John could hear the yawn in her voice from where he was. Listening to that expertly feigned sleepiness induced in him an agony of ambivalence. (The door was being opened. Godzilla comes.) He couldn’t believe that his Sally of the gentle eyes and honest smile could be such an actress. There were questions he had to think over, though not now. The other part of the feeling was the fervent hope that she really was as good an actress as she sounded. A lot depended on her performance.

‘It took you long enough.’

‘I was sleeping, Alec. Here, let me help you.’

Alec’s feet were thudding all over the hall and there were noises that might have been several bodies hitting off the walls. He sounded like a drunken regiment. An alarming proximity of heavy breathing made John think they had reached the bedroom door. It might have been John’s imagination but he had a suspicion of the presence of foetid breath, as of a carnivore exhaling close at hand.

‘You’ve had somebody in here!’

John was suddenly aware of the fragility of Wendy Houses. A tunnel would have been handy.

‘That’s right. Four men.’

John didn’t see the joke. Pacify, pacify, he was thinking.

‘You’ve had somebody in here!’

‘I was sleeping!’

‘Maybe. Ah’m goin’ to check.’

There was an amazing amount of noise, which was apparently Alec going through to the living-room. Whatever previous convictions had qualified Alec for admission to ‘The Barley Bree’, burglary wasn’t one of them. He made a small riot of coming back towards the bedroom. Sally was still insisting on helping him. John wondered how you did that. It must have been like guiding a stampede.

‘That’s you now,’ she was saying. ‘There we are. Satisfied now?’

‘Okay, love. Ah know ye’re tellin’ the truth. When Ah saw that the telly was off.’

John was relieved that Alec’s deductive powers weren’t in proportion to his imagined bulk. John was holding himself well back from the cut-out windows of the Wendy House. Christine or Sally had stuck cellophane across them and John decided now that the light was like trying to see underwater – the mysteries of the deep. He was aware of Sally’s white nightdress with red flowers eddying uncertainly around the room. A huge dark shape swayed beside her.

‘Ah haven’t seen you for a fortnight,’ Alec growled gently.

‘You’re seeing me now. Come on, lie down. You look whacked.’

‘A fortnight,’ Alec said.

‘You need some rest.’

‘A fortnight.’

Once Alec got hold of an idea, he didn’t give it up easily. He wasn’t moving. The thought that he hadn’t seen Sally for a fortnight appeared to have transfixed him, like some great revelation not vouchsafed to many.

‘A fortnight.’

‘A fortnight, Alec.’

Something was biting into John’s unstockinged foot savagely. The pain was becoming unbearable but he was afraid to move. He was also terrified that if he changed the position of his other leg the knee would crack. He could be the first recorded case of a stiff knee proving fatal. Alec spoke an eerie echo of John’s thought.

‘It’s a good thing for whoever it is that he isny here.’

The logic was opaque but John understood it perfectly.

‘That’s right,’ Sally said.

‘A fortnight,’ Alec said.

In a moment of wild panic, John could imagine the cryptic exchange going on until his emaciated body was lifted too late, from the Wendy House. There was a noise that he was sure meant Alec had sat down on the bed. He hoped that was a good sign. Something hit the Wendy House and it buckled slightly and rattled against his head. He almost called out in panic.

‘Oops,’ Alec said.

‘Watch Christine’s Wendy House.’

No, no, you bloody mug, John was screaming to himself. Don’t draw his attention to it. What Wendy House? There is no Wendy House. He might come over and inspect it for damage.

‘’S all right, love,’ Alec said. ‘Just ma shoe.’

The other shoe hit the floor.

‘Lie down, Alec.’

‘Hm?’

‘Let me get your jacket off. That’s it. Right, lie down.’

‘Uh-huh.’

The bed squeaked on its castors. Alec sighed, a sound like a small whirlwind. There was silence. John strained into it desperately. He was about to move his leg when he froze the movement, biting his lip.

‘Sally,’ Alec said.

Sally said nothing. A couple of minutes passed. Someone was at the door of the Wendy House. Although John had seen Sally’s nightdress move towards him, he was still tensed as the door opened, as though it might have been Alec in drag. Sally was crouched looking in at him, her forefinger to her lips. Did she think he might be singing? She held his clothes with one arm against her body. With the other she motioned him to follow.

Tiptoeing after her, John couldn’t escape the hallucinatory feeling that he was in a fairy story after all. And John tiptoed from his little house past the sleeping giant and followed the good fairy. He glanced very quickly at Alec in case looking at him might waken him. He seemed gross in sleep. His mouth, like every other part of him, appeared to make more noise than was consistent with performing its basic function. His lips flapped in the wind of his breathing.

In the hall, John studied his heel briefly and saw the imprint of the face of the miniature doll – savage little household god. As he dressed very swiftly, Sally stroked his hair a couple of times. She mouthed his ear. Was she mad? He had noticed that before about women, how quickly they forgot risk when they were feeling roused. At the open door she held his arm.

‘It’s all right now,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just that he’s impossible when he’s drunk.’

John nodded.

‘In the morning I’ll send him packing. No problem. He’ll go like a lamb.’

John nodded.

‘I don’t see him now, you know. That’s all finished. There’s nothing between us. It’s just taking him time to get over it. He’s living in the past. But he has no rights here. And he knows it.’

John nodded. Of course. That’s why he was taking up two-thirds of her bed.

‘Listen. I hope this hasn’t put you off.’

John nodded and then changed to shaking his head. Not at all. Why should the possibility of being beaten to death every time you got into bed put you off?

‘Sally!’

She winked, kissed the tips of her fingers and touched them to his lips.

‘It’s all right, Alec,’ John heard her call as he came downstairs, letting the darkness take him into it. She rattled the milk bottles she had put out when the baby-sitter left. ‘I’m just locking up.’

John had brooded on the significance of that evening ever since. Sometimes, without warning, fragments of it would occur to him. He would hear ‘Sally! Sally!’ or see her face, distorted with panic, as she lay beneath him. Such moments came to him isolated and complete, inexplicable but stubbornly there, ciphers the pilgrim found along his way. But in what direction were they pointing him? Their repetitiousness suggested he hadn’t resolved them. They were liable to turn up anywhere, in a pub, in the car, at a football match on a wet evening.

‘Tackle, Freddie, tackle!’ Jodhpurs was calling.

Gary had the ball. As Freddie lunged towards him, Gary drew the ball back and then threaded it neatly through Freddie’s legs and ran round him, leaving him stranded. ‘Nutmegged him,’ John muttered to himself. It was a way in which professional players hated to be beaten, perhaps because it made you look so silly – your legs, the very basis of your craft, being reduced to the role of a triumphal arch for the parade of your opponent’s skills. John was absurdly pleased. He glanced along at Jodhpurs as if he had taken revenge on her loud ignorance.

‘Sally! Sally!’

He had seen her since then in her office and once had a drink with her (not in ‘The Barley Bree’). She gave him occasional reports on the nocturnal activities of Alec Manson. His visits were apparently becoming less frequent. ‘He’s coming to his senses,’ Sally had said but John wasn’t convinced that would ever be a permanent place of residence for Alec. Sally seemed still to expect that they would some time continue where they had left off, once Alec’s supposed refusal to forget the past had died of exhaustion. John wasn’t so sure.

He had thought about it a lot and and he believed (how could he be sure?) that his uncertainties didn’t come from fear of Alec. Now that he understood the risks, the location and habits of the dragon as it were, he felt he could work out ways to reach the maiden safely. But he suspected she was no longer the maiden he had thought she was. He still relished the memory of her body and would have liked to go back there but – such was the fervour of his dreams – he could only do it with his faith intact. Paradoxically, to accept her offer of herself would have been for him to diminish her unless he did it on terms of belief in her.

That belief had been undermined to some extent. ‘A fortnight’ had been carved on John’s mind. Alec had said it as if it meant a long time in his terms. Surely he wasn’t always drunk and surely he didn’t always go there just to sleep. John thought perhaps Sally had been lying to him. And, besides that central matter, his sense of Sally had been irredeemably altered. ‘Oh shite!’ was something he would never have imagined her saying, a glimpse of another person, just as the nature of Alec had been. How had she become involved with a bouncer from ‘The Barley Bree’?’