Читать книгу Weekend - William McIlvanney - Страница 9

One

It was that time when, during an evening’s drinking, conversation puts away the telescopic rifle and takes out the scattergun. Jacqui had been the first to reach that point, Alison thought.

‘Crap,’ Jacqui was saying. ‘All men. Crap. Why do we bother?’

Kate was laughing her nervous laugh.

‘I could believe you more,’ Alison said, ‘if you didn’t seem hypnotised by the bum-parade at the bar.’

‘Choosing a target,’ Jacqui said. She went into an American accent. ‘I feel like kicking ass.’

Alison managed not to yawn. She didn’t like Jacqui in this mood, one which she was putting on more and more, like power dressing. It had been like that ever since Kevin walked out on her. That must have been a traumatic moment, it was true. But it bothered Alison that what had been an understandable reaction was threatening to extend into a lifestyle.

Alison understood how she must have felt but, concerned as she was for Jacqui, she couldn’t quite see how she was justified in judging everybody by one dire experience. One creepy man didn’t define a species. Why did Jacqui have to come on like an embittered veteran of the sex war when she had only been involved seriously in one skirmish? She sometimes acted like fifty instead of twenty-one. At twenty-six, Alison still felt more open to experience than Jacqui seemed, though not as vulnerable as Kate, she had to admit. But then who was?

Alison watched Kate reacting to any loud laugh or shouted comment that happened in the bar, sensitive as a thoroughbred filly to every shift in the wind. She looked younger than nineteen. She hadn’t even realised yet how good-looking she was. The thought endeared her to Alison all over again. Surrounded by people who wore their ordinariness like peacock feathers, Kate’s modesty was luminous. In a place where so many voices seemed to be inventing what life owed them, she appeared still to be waiting for life to discover her.

Alison thought of a television programme she had seen some time ago. It was supposed to be an attempt to discover new pop stars. One of the contestants was a weedy boy with an ego so big he should have had an articulated lorry to carry it around. His voice was awful but, when he was voted out, all he felt was contempt for the stupidity of the voters. He explained why, stroking a scrawny moustache that looked as if his father might have given him it for Christmas, like a cowboy suit. But he should never have allowed his son out of the house with it on. ‘You see,’ the boy said, explaining why he should have won. ‘What they don’t seem to understand is. You can teach anybody how to sing. But you can’t teach good looks.’ Nor, it had occurred to Alison, how to recognise them.

The wild egotist would have fitted in perfectly in this bar. Alison was wondering when, instead of waiting for the world to tell us what we need to know about ourselves, people had decided to tell the world what it needed to know about them. She felt that Jacqui was already hardening into an example of that attitude: take one pinpoint of experience and project it assumptively to infinity. Life is what you say it is, not what it tells you it is.

When Kevin left, Alison and Kate had arrived in Jacqui’s flat to help her through the trauma – at least that was what Alison had thought they were doing. They had finished up moving in with her. But instead of helping her to get beyond her bad time, they seemed to have allowed her simply to get comfortable in it. Their sympathy had apparently reinforced her bitterness rather than alleviating it.

As if confirming what Alison was thinking, Jacqui looked round the bar critically, like a judge at an amateur-dramatics competition who wasn’t impressed. Kate observed her anxiously.

‘I still fancy going,’ Kate said.

‘For what?’ Jacqui said. ‘What can you get there you can’t get here?’ She indicated the busy bar. ‘If you want it, that is.’

Alison resented Jacqui’s enjoyment of the influence she had over Kate. It was obvious that Kate was keen to go on the study weekend Professor Lawson had organised. It was also obvious that she didn’t feel confident enough to go without Jacqui’s company. Alison smiled. It was so like Kate to get excited about something as banal as a trip to Cannamore. Peter Pan with tits – to go on a study weekend will be a great adventure. Still, such naïve enthusiasm was refreshing. In deciding to try to help Kate manoeuvre Jacqui into going on the trip, Alison admitted to herself that she had her own reasons for wanting to be in the flat without them this weekend. But maybe altruism was always leavened with self-interest.

‘What can you get there that you can’t get here?’ Alison said. ‘Maybe the chance to explore more than somebody else’s crotch.’

‘You mean there is more?’ Jacqui said.

‘Oh, enough with the Cynic-of-the-Year stuff,’ Alison said. ‘For a start, you’ll have a chance to talk to men without any assumptions being made. In places like this, you smile and some of them think you’ve thrown your knickers at them.’

‘Men? You mean like Andrew Lawson?’

‘He’s nice,’ Kate said. ‘He’s very nice.’

‘I didn’t say he wasn’t.’

‘At least he says some interesting things,’ Alison said.

‘He said I was to phone him tonight if we decided to go,’ Kate said. ‘He’s got two cancellations. He’ll be waiting to hear.’

Jacqui turned her mouth down.

‘Come on,’ Kate said. ‘What about it?’

‘I went last year,’ Alison said. ‘It was really good.’

Jacqui took a delaying sip of her Bacardi and Coke.

‘Where is it anyway?’

‘Willowvale,’ Kate said.

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Jacqui said.

‘You missed the lecture when Andrew Lawson told us about it. He told us a lot about the place. It sounds really interesting.’

‘Willowvale?’

Its foundations had been laid in the imagination of a Victorian mill-owner, Andrew Lawson had told his students. He knew that because the present owner, Gordon Mitchell, had given him a copy of a monograph called Edward Muldoon: The Other Carnegie, by P. Vincent J. Witherspoon. Gordon had offered him the pamphlet not just because he was a frequent visitor but because he was obviously as fascinated by the place as its owner was. From the first time he went there with his students, he had sensed the building not just as a place but as a brooding presence. Like a stranger looming large but saying nothing, it challenged him to understand it.

The monograph, Andrew quickly decided, wasn’t about to tell the true story of Willowvale. As he read, turning back from time to time to look at the black-and-white cover, it occurred to him that the way the author presented his own name was a clue. P. Vincent J. Witherspoon was as stiff as a starched collar. The date of the printing was 1926 but P. Vincent J., to give him his informal name, would already be old by that time and must have remained a discreet Victorian while the twenties roared around him.

Also, he had been a personal friend of Edward Muldoon, a slightly more youthful, admiring one, and was writing after Muldoon’s death. It was an act of homage, a Victorian statue in words, offering a life as a frozen stance rather than a fluid reality. Witherspoon was anxious not only to choose the most flattering posture he could find for his friend but for himself as well. There would be no treacherous deviation into harsh truth from this staunch supporter. That the monograph appeared to have been printed privately with Witherspoon’s own money must have allowed his work to avoid any interference from others.

Witherspoon wasn’t actively dishonest. Hints of an interpretation of Muldoon’s life bleaker than the one on offer here were scattered through his writing like polite coughing, which you were left to interpret as you would. Andrew learned to appreciate trying to work out what the tangential remarks and discreet silences might mean.

‘It might be said that his beloved spouse found their splendid new dwelling less congenial than might have been anticipated.’ She was probably miserable, Andrew thought. ‘Yet even Croesus must have deemed it necessary to curtail the grandiosity of his ambitions.’ Muldoon ran out of money?

Andrew even began to enjoy Witherspoon’s evasive prose. It somehow suited Willowvale, the monument the monograph had been written essentially to celebrate. Like the building, the words were ornate beyond necessity. They baffled instant understanding of their purpose, as Willowvale did. Through careful rereadings, Andrew found himself engaged in an imaginative inhabiting of a darker life than the one being presented to him.

Witherspoon had a long and florid section near the beginning of his account where he suggested what had been the origins of Muldoon’s compulsion to build Willowvale. Many of his expressions reverberated in Andrew’s mind: ‘He was a visionary among the dark satanic mills’, ‘a place where truth might disport itself among congenial company’, ‘wealth metamorphosed into wisdom’, ‘a sea-girt Eden’, ‘a dwelling for his dreams’. Bringing the punctiliousness of an academic to such language, trying to sift fact from linguistic fabrication, Andrew worked out his own sense of the life of Edward Muldoon and what Willowvale was supposed to mean. Muldoon had been the son of a Scottish mill-owner whose crass love of money had offended his youthful sensitivities. After a failed attempt to be a painter, he had grudgingly accepted his destiny as a capitalist. Like many converts to a faith, he had become assiduous in the practice of it. Perhaps out of revenge, some thought, he made his father’s success look like the work of a dilettante. One mill became many.

But Andrew was convinced that those who thought he was merely extending his father’s achievement were mistaken. The intensity of his new religion had an almost mystical dimension to it. Witherspoon had some basis for seeing him as a visionary. The more money he made, the more likely he was to be able to transubstantiate it into his vision, which was Willowvale.

‘So where is Willowvale?’ Jacqui said.

She saw Kate’s face become more animated, presumably because the question suggested serious interest and therefore the prospect of going.

‘On Cannamore,’ Kate said.

‘But that’s an island.’

‘They have things called ferries,’ Alison said.

‘I don’t like the sea. I get seasick easily.’

‘Maybe you should wait till they build an airport,’ Alison said.

Alison’s superciliousness was beginning to annoy Jacqui again. Because she had worked as personal assistant to a lawyer for a few years before coming to university, she had these moods when she seemed to treat younger people as if they were still in kindergarten. She was like someone who visits London for a weekend and decides she’s cosmopolitan and very, very grown-up. She even dressed for the part. For her, casual was formality with a button undone. She was being particularly condescending tonight.

‘What’s it all in aid of anyway?’ Jacqui said, brooding on Alison.

‘See it as part of the course,’ Kate said. ‘We have informal lectures. And discussion afterwards. Andrew Lawson’s doing one on Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. David Cudlipp’s talking about Farewell, Miss Julie Logan. And Harry Beck’s supposed to be tying it all up in some way.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ Jacqui said. ‘I’m surprised there’s still free places.’

‘I wonder what Harry Beck’ll be talking about,’ Kate said, as if it were a matter of great fascination.

‘He’s probably wondering himself,’ Alison said.

‘What do you mean by that?’ Jacqui said.

‘I just think he looks like someone with a very dishevelled life,’ Alison said. ‘Sometimes when he comes into class, he looks as if he’s not sure what he’s doing there. It can take him ten minutes to focus on the work.’

‘You seem to focus on him quickly enough,’ Jacqui said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen you looking at him,’ Jacqui said.

‘I always do that when I want to see somebody.’

‘Staring? With your lips parted?’

‘I’m a mouth-breather.’

Jacqui couldn’t understand why Alison was being so offhand about Harry Beck. She had often said he was attractive. The sudden shift of attitude was annoying.

‘There’s something about him,’ Jacqui said. ‘I like the darkness in him.’

‘He’s really got a past him, hasn’t he?’ Kate said.

‘Doesn’t everybody?’ Alison said.

‘Something definitely happened to him,’ Kate said. ‘And he’s having to live with it.’

‘You’ve been reading Wuthering Heights again,’ Alison said.

‘I know what you mean,’ Jacqui said to Kate. ‘He was married, wasn’t he? But he doesn’t seem to have any children. Maybe he couldn’t have any. Maybe it’s that. Or maybe he loved somebody he could never get.’

‘There’s something troubled about him,’ Kate said.

‘It’s probably a bad back,’ Alison said. ‘Anyway, now’s your chance to find out.’

She looked at Jacqui. Jacqui wondered how she had come to be in the position of having an interest in Harry Beck. It was as if she was being deputised to stand in for Alison.

‘They have a free-for-all session on Saturday night,’ Alison said. ‘The students can do their own thing. Talks. Poetry. Anything goes. The barriers come down. It was great fun last year when I was there.’

‘So why aren’t you going again?’ Jacqui said.

‘I’ve got that history essay to write. It’ll take me all weekend.’

‘You just want the flat to yourself. With Kate and me away. Peace and quiet.’

‘I wish I could go.’

‘You can,’ Kate said to Jacqui.

‘I don’t know,’ Jacqui said. ‘I could’ve pulled Harry Beck here if I wanted to. Without going to the ends of the earth. Anyway, I’ve heard he’s so unreliable, you never know whether he’s going to turn up or not. Harry Beck?’

‘Harry Beck,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I’ve been under the covers with you a few times.’

The accent was American.

He recognised an innocent remark wearing garters. He had heard it before and he knew that she meant reading him in bed. He assumed she must mean the column since, as far as he knew, the books were out of print. Dan Galbraith had just introduced them to each other and now he fetched her the gin and tonic she had asked for and left them. As they spoke, he noticed that the man she had come to the party with seemed to have decided to start a drinking competition. He was apparently trying to see if he could drink himself under the table. He looked like succeeding.

He liked how she had met him on a level of immediate flirtation. That way the trivia could at least amplify into a pleasant game.

‘I hope I didn’t give you a false impression,’ he said. ‘I’m usually more animated in bed than my photo is.’

‘But your photo does look younger,’ she said.

‘I was a child prodigy,’ he said.

He couldn’t quite see how that remark related to what she had been saying but he managed to say it as if it were a witty rejoinder. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

‘I liked your last one. About the dogs,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’

‘But it wasn’t true about that dog you called Snarl, was it?’

‘I’m afraid so. Could make you give up on the species, couldn’t it? The human one, I mean.’

‘And I can’t believe what you said about Bruce.’

‘You’re speaking of the dog I used to love. I wouldn’t lie about Bruce. He would have skated any canine Mastermind.’

‘Do you like cats?’

‘Of course. We used to have hordes of them, too, when I was a kid. Not all at once, of course. But I’ve always been fond of cats. A bit like having somebody from MI5 billeted in the house. You never know what they’re up to. But I like that about them.’

‘We have a cat.’ The ‘we’ was ominous. Was she married to the peripatetic vat? ‘Maisie. She has the run of the house. Sometimes sleeps on my bed.’

‘My’ bed. Green shoots of hope showing again.

‘Oh, we’ll have to see about that,’ he said.

She looked at him, slightly startled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it could be dangerous. Maybe pass something on to you. All that proximity of fur.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Also. Could maybe do some physical damage when you least expect it. Bite your bare bum or that.’

‘And why would your bum be bare?’

‘I honestly can’t think of a reason offhand. But I’m sure there must be one somewhere.’

They were smiling at each other when a man, walking as if he had a brass band behind him, came up and shook hands without preliminary, introduced himself and said, ‘I’m a lawyer.’ Harry just managed to stifle an impulse to say, ‘Ssh. If you don’t announce it, maybe nobody’ll guess.’ Instead, he introduced the lawyer to her, allowing her to supply her name, which he couldn’t immediately remember. Mary Sue. He was trying to resign himself with grace to a three-way conversation when he realised this was to be a monologue. The lawyer was here to put him right about something he had written in his column. The man was obviously one of those people who mistake fluency for articulacy. As long as he kept talking, he assumed he was saying something of significance. He thought conversation was a one-way street. As Harry had dreaded, it was a street where she wasn’t going to loiter. She turned down her mouth at him and drifted away.

Time passes, like a three-legged tortoise sometimes.

‘What you don’t seem to appreciate,’ the man was saying, ‘is that those lawyers were simply fulfilling a public service by being there.’

He was trying to remember which column the man was going on about. It must be the one where he had attacked that legal firm which was picketing its local casualty units, distributing leaflets on how to claim for compensation if anything went wrong with your treatment.

‘I admit it’s possible that some few may be a trifle over-zealous,’ the man said.

‘Hm.’ (Excuse me while I go and throw myself off a cliff.)

‘But –’

He had lost track of her. That had been pleasant for a moment there, relaxed nonsense behind which their eyes had been reading each other like a sub-text. He had enjoyed her presence. He figured her about mid-thirties, maybe slightly over that. She had an attractiveness that made him not just wonder where she had been but wish a little he could have been there with her. Her body had reached the point of being opulently fleshed without yet being heavy. The soft blonde hair imbued her maturity with a warm glow. Given the almost anorexic fashionability of most of the younger women in the room, she had been like coming upon a Renoir in a gallery of Lowrys. Not that he didn’t like Lowry but he knew whose figures he would rather get physically involved with.

‘I don’t see why lawyers should be criticised for finding enterprising ways to ply their trade.’

His eyes were wandering round the room when he saw her. She was standing among a group of men. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she? But she was looking at him. The glance congealed into a stare. He didn’t know how long it took her eyes to turn away towards one of the men. Five seconds? Fifteen? But it had been as if they were looking at each other down a private, silent corridor. If that was just a glance, it was one your imagination could feed off for a month. It was a glance that felt like an assignation.

‘I say, good on them,’ the lawyer was saying.

Had he imagined it? She was talking with the men again. They weren’t a bad-looking group either. Especially two of the three. And they were young.

He hadn’t imagined it. To think that would just be giving himself an excuse for not trying to connect. She hadn’t come in with those men. The man she had come in with was looking as if the stomach pump might have to be summoned at any moment. He knew him as a friend of Dan Galbraith. Alec Something he was called. Maybe his connection with Mary Sue was casual.

He had to do something. He suspected that if he tiptoed away from the talking man, the absence might not be noticed. The man was so busy listening to himself, he didn’t need anybody else.

Maybe he had shut down his reception system automatically as a mode of self-protection, but he could no longer follow the lawyer’s monologue in detail. It had degenerated in his ears into a babble of soundbites in contemporary non-speak – stopping bucks and care in the community and final analyses and, bizarrely zooming in from outer space, the trial of Oscar Wilde.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m just going over to the table here.’ (It’s either that or suicide.) ‘Maybe we’ll connect with each other later.’ (Say, if you’ve got a lasso.)

‘Hold on a minute,’ the man said, putting his hand on his arm. ‘I don’t think you’ve got my point at all.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you got mine. The main thing I was saying in the piece was that a democracy functions on consensus. Mutual goodwill. Take that away and it caves in on itself. If you’ve got one of our crucial institutions skulking round the premises of another for profit, and one that happens to be the most important one in our lives, you’ve got consensus disintegrating. Every dingo dog for himself. I admire the NHS. Apart from women’s emancipation, I think it’s the single most important piece of legislation we had in the twentieth century. You haven’t confronted any of that.’

‘No, no, no. Listen.’

‘I’ve listened. Two things. Take your hand off my arm. And – as Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say – piss off.’

He went over to the table which had been set up as an improvised bar. He was angry at himself for getting angry. This was Dan’s party. Once at the table, he loitered, waiting to calm down. He was also waiting for an amazing plan to arrive. All he could think of was that she drank gin and tonic. That was what Dan had given her. He made one carefully, turned and walked towards her group.

She noticed him as he came towards her. She smiled at him and was about to say something. Anything. Maybe ‘Hello again.’ But he took the almost empty glass she was nursing and replaced it with a full one. He looked at her and turned and walked away. The men around her had gone silent. She took a tentative sip from the glass. It was gin and tonic. She was impressed that he had remembered. The voices started up around her again.

‘What was that all about?’

‘Is he the part-time barman?’

‘Who is he anyway?’

‘Harry Beck,’ she said.

They obviously had never heard of him. She was remembering the sudden darkness of his eyes. They were intense. She liked that.

‘Anyway,’ the one called John said. ‘Then we started on the champagne. And it was Moët. That was a party.’

She watched him cross to the table and mix himself a drink. Whisky and water he took. Dan Galbraith called to him and he went over and sat on the floor beside Dan’s chair, leaning his back against the wall. She enjoyed the way he moved. She wondered what they were talking about.

‘I need a bit of company tonight,’ Dan was saying. ‘I don’t want to go into my fifties alone.’

‘You’ve got plenty of that, then.’

‘I don’t know about Sylvia’s insistence on the long dresses, though. A bit formal, isn’t it?’

‘I like it. I like seeing women like that. I don’t know. It makes me imagine a more romantic time. Fin de siècle or something. End of the nineteenth century.’

‘In a way it’s quite a good wake, I suppose,’ Dan said. ‘Burying your forties. That was a nice funeral oration you gave.’

‘It was meant to be about the future as well as the past.’

‘I know, I know. It’s all right for you. You’ve still got most of your forties to come,’ Dan said.

‘Uh-huh. But what am I doing with them?’

It was a remark thrown out casually that came back to attack him. He was mugged by his own question. While Dan reminisced gently, he found himself trapped among thoughts the question had released in him. His part in the conversation became mainly nods and vague sounds of assent.

What was he doing with his forties? He sometimes felt his nature was a beast he hadn’t learned to domesticate. It did what it wanted rather than what he tried to train it to do.

‘Remember the party we had when your first novel came out,’ Dan said. ‘That was an event.’

‘It was.’

And thanks for giving me a memory I don’t need at the moment. How many years ago was that? Fifteen? Sixteen? It was in a wine bar which had since disappeared. Passing the place where it used to be, he sometimes wondered if he had dreamed it. It was a Pizzaland now. He certainly seemed to have dreamed the possibilities with which he had sensed the place shimmering that evening.

Lodgings in Eden had been out for three weeks then. He had decided to wait before having the party in case the book sank without trace and people wouldn’t know what they were supposed to be celebrating. But all the reviews that were in had been good. The book had reached number nine in a bestseller list. Since he had never again appeared on any such list, he had, of course, realised that they were things of no serious significance. But then that entry at nine had seemed an omen of a bright future.

So many other things that evening had supported the feeling. He was standing among a lot of people who were happy for him and wishing him well. He was twenty-eight. He had already written a book that he was entitled to call, however briefly, a bestseller. Maggi was still with him and they had plans to choose somewhere to live where she could take a job teaching and he could write his next book. The publishers were happy and waiting for it. He had ideas for evermore. If this was what he could achieve at the first attempt, what might he be able to do over the next few years?

Not a lot, as it transpired. He still couldn’t understand it. How had something as solid as that moment turned into a mirage? Perhaps the first thing he had done wrong was to work so hard on the second novel. Perhaps success, like some women, is turned off by being courted too abjectly. It took six years for him to deliver Winter in August. When it was finally published, it felt like his second first novel, so long had it come after Lodgings in Eden. It emerged to a thunderous silence. Something in him died with the book.

His confidence was broken. It was as if another Columbus had set out to discover new worlds and landed on Rockall. The bleakness of where he found himself spread like a blight into the lives around him. He didn’t blame Maggi for leaving him. If he could have found the way to do it, he would have parted with himself. He made a half-hearted attempt at it by leaving Skye and coming back to Glasgow. But he brought his dead ambition with him, like a corpse in a suitcase. He unpacked it with his clothes and had sat staring at it for years, willing it to breathe again.

But the book of short stories he had published five years later merely reaffirmed where he thought he was – trapped in a fantasy of his own making. They could have sold more copies of In Places at the Time if he had gone round the houses with them. He almost did.

He knew his reaction to his own failure was exaggerated but he couldn’t control it. Since his teens he had invested almost all his hopes in being a writer, and the high of his brief initial success had been so intense that he couldn’t adjust to the experience of coming down. He seemed to have spent the time since the failure of Winter in August in a kind of unsuccessful psychological rehab. Even sitting here with Dan Galbraith, he still couldn’t believe that what he had thought was an infinity of promise had contracted by now to waiting for a letter, which still hadn’t come. His future, he was thinking, had reduced itself to the contents of an envelope.

‘Sometimes,’ Dan was saying, ‘I wish I had achieved half of what you have.’

‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

‘You’ve written something,’ Dan said. ‘Me? I’ve reached the dizzy heights of being a sub-editor. Your books’ll be there when you’ve gone.’

Where would they be? Recycled into toilet-tissue? If they survived, they would be like some of the more egregious tombstones you sometimes saw in cemeteries – proclaiming not the importance of the people who lay under them, just their misguided sense of that importance. And very seldom read.

The truth, he realised again, was that other people’s assumptions about his success were, in a strange way, what hurt him most of all. They were such a contradiction of what he felt was the truth about himself that they made a performance of much of his life. He sometimes felt he was going around pretending to be somebody else.

Even his invitation to come here tonight had been partly related to the mistaken sense of him that people had when they knew of the books. He had been friendly with Dan for years and he would have been glad to come anyway. But he was also aware that Dan had been especially keen for him to be there because he was the nearest thing Dan could get to a half-baked local celebrity. Hence the speech. It was the equivalent of getting somebody who was known slightly for being known slightly to cut the ribbon at the opening of the supermarket.

‘And what have I achieved?’ Dan was saying.

He looked round the tastefully furnished room, saw the attractiveness of Dan’s wife and two daughters.

‘Look around you,’ he said.

‘I know, I know,’ Dan said. ‘I’m grateful for what I’ve got. I’m very proud of my family. But all I’ve managed to be is a sub-editor on a paper. I still envy you the legacy of words you’re leaving.’

Some bequest to the nation, he was thinking. Still, maybe they could use it as a warning to others on the folly of misguided ambition. He heard fake laughter somewhere, not so much a laugh as a shout with bells on.

He traced it to the man who had come in with her. He was sitting in a chair, gesticulating wildly at someone or something. It was hard to tell which, since his focus didn’t seem too precise.

‘All the same,’ Dan said. ‘You could have written a lot more. If you hadn’t been such a madman.’

‘Comes with the territory, I suppose. A sane writer’s probably an oxymoron. Anyway, journalism’s writing. Although I’m not even a real journalist. I just write a column. But I’m not knocking it. I need it. I’ve got into the habit of eating.’

‘What about the poetry? You never try to publish any of that?’

‘I don’t write poetry. Who are we kidding? I write daft verses. Light verse, my man.’ He said it with a BBC accent, or what had once been a BBC accent. ‘So light, if you breathe on it too heavily you could blow it away. The only place I might get it published would be on a greetings card.’

She had crossed the room to the windmill in the chair. She seemed to be trying to reason with him, which couldn’t be an easy trick. They were obviously going to be leaving soon. He had missed his chance to connect seriously with her. When he had done the thing with the gin and tonic, it had felt dramatic and peremptory. Now it felt stupid. What was that supposed to achieve? I’m the drink-delivery man. Boldness was what was needed.

She had partly succeeded in calming the man down. He had gone into muttering mode. Now she was talking to Sylvia, who had been hovering – hostess in a state of mild alarm. Sylvia brought her a piece of paper and a pen, and began to use her mobile. It was taxi time.

She was writing something. He had hoped it would be a love letter to him but it was too short for that. Dan rose and went to talk to Sylvia. Putting the pen down, she started to walk. He was taken aback by how exciting it was to know that he was the one she was coming towards. She came and stood beside him, her back to the wall, and so close that her dress overlapped on his outstretched trouser leg. She sighed. ‘I’m going to have to leave soon,’ she said. ‘He’s just a friend. He asked me to partner him tonight. But I’ll have to see he gets back safely to his place.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said and put his hand under her dress.

He thought: What the hell am I doing? Get the handcuffs ready.

She thought: Ooh. No. That can’t be what I thought it was. It is. It is.

In the time it took her to believe the incredible, what she thought would have been her response was displaced by pure sensation. His hand was resting at the top of her calf. The hand didn’t feel aggressive. It felt as gentle as a bird nestling there. It was less threat than plea. By not rejecting him immediately, she became part of a conspiracy of two against the rest. She found that she was enjoying the conspiracy. She had wanted him to make some kind of move all night. Well, he had certainly done that. They were standing in a busy room sharing a secret intimacy.

Not having been arrested, he began to stroke her calf gently. She wanted to talk casually, about anything, she decided. She felt it was a way of adding to the clandestine sensation.

‘I still think you made up that stuff about Snarl,’ she said.

‘Only the name. Sadly enough,’ he said.

‘And Bruce?’

‘Bruce was real. Probably realer than most of us. Although this feels quite real.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘The weather’s been pretty mixed, eh?’

‘I see they’ve had rain in California.’

‘This is a lovely way to spend an evening.’

‘I feel as if I could sing that.’

‘Feel free.’

Sylvia was signalling over.

‘Why do taxis always come at the wrong time?’ she said. ‘I have to go. No, don’t get up. I want to remember you this way. But I do think you should leave now.’

His hand gently squeezed the back of her calf and then was gone.

‘Here,’ she said, giving him the piece of paper she had written on. ‘I was wondering whether to give you this. Now I’m sure. I’m going to check that article sometime for lies.’

He watched her get her coat and usher the man out with the help of Dan. He looked at the paper she had given him. It contained her phone number and her name: Mary Sue. Mary Sue.

His hand closed round the scrap of paper as if it were a nugget of gold. He leaned his head against the wall. He folded the paper and put it carefully in his hip pocket. He hoped he would still want to phone her when he was sober. Then he saw her come back in, taking off her coat. She said something to Sylvia. He watched her mix two drinks at the table. One seemed to be whisky and water. She turned and walked towards him until she was standing beside him, exactly where she had stood before.

‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘The taxi-driver was nice. Said he’ll look after him.’

She handed him the drink that looked like whisky and water.

Sometimes the gods smile upon the lunatic, he thought.

‘Cannamore?’ Alison said. ‘Ends of the earth? It’s about an hour on the ferry.’

‘Her sense of geography is prehistoric,’ Kate said.

‘At least my sense of men isn’t. Like you, Kate. Dark pasts and romantic figures wrapped in mystery. Like a bloody opera-cloak. What’re you waiting for? To meet Byron in Tesco’s? He’s dead. Long time dead. Look at them.’

She indicated the young men at the bar. Kate followed her nodding head. She saw, first of all, the living representation of a thought she had often had: the physical variety of people is amazing. Wasn’t it incredible that, with all the people there were in the world, you couldn’t find two exactly the same? Even identical twins weren’t really identical. The term didn’t describe the reality, just the carelessness with which people observed the reality. And beyond a category like that, all was blatant and mind-blowing difference.

What life managed to do with limited materials was astounding. After all, how many different shapes could you give to something as basic as a nose? A bone, a lump of skin and two breathing holes. It wasn’t exactly, you would have thought, the stuff of infinite variation. How many eye-colours could you get? Not a lot, and you weren’t allowed to have different colours within any one iris. You couldn’t, for example, have striped eyes. That might have helped to vary things a bit. And mouths. Two soft folds of flesh around a set of teeth or the lack of them, as the case may be. It really was amazing.

Look at those men at the bar. Everything was slightly different about each of them. Height, weight, hair, features – everything. Looking at them, she realised what exactly she had against Dolly the sheep. Well, not against Dolly personally but against the whole idea of cloning. (Come to think of it, could you have anything against a clone personally, since it was not itself in the first place but merely an imitation of somebody else? It would be like, say, standing in a cave with someone. And they insult you. And the insult has an echo. It would be like starting an argument with the echo. Instead of with the person who insulted you. Something like that.)

But that was what was wrong with cloning. People were always discussing the ethics of it. It didn’t seem to her it was so much a matter of ethics as a matter of the nature of experience. The whole nature of life, it seemed to her, moved towards difference, unique individuality. At least, among people that was true. In a sense, life never repeated itself. Cloning was a precise, deliberate repetition. Cloning was anti-life.

Yet, watching the men at the bar, she was forced to wonder if cloning had been invented before Dolly had come along. For all their immediately obvious physical differences, these men seemed determined to pretend they were all one another. It wasn’t just their clothes. The behaviour of each was like an echo of everybody else in the group. They had the same self-assurance, the same way of glancing arrogantly round the pub. They laughed like a convention of mimics. They were trying, she decided, to clone themselves psychologically.

It was sad. It was sad because it couldn’t be true. There had to be some who felt a little insecurity. Maybe one didn’t feel tough at all. Maybe one was afraid of spiders. Maybe one was even still a virgin. But you couldn’t have guessed it.

It wasn’t that she would have expected them to declare such things publicly. She didn’t expect them to walk about with placards round their necks. Fragile – Handle with Care. Arachnaphobics Anonymous. Vagina might as well be a state in America for all I know about it. (That would have to be a sandwich-board, she supposed.) But she would have hoped the truth of themselves might be honestly, if obliquely, expressed in the way they acted towards others. Otherwise the most interesting aspects of themselves, the places where they really lived, were being denied all the time. So how could you hope ever really to meet them or, perhaps more importantly, allow them to meet you?

With these men, she didn’t even want to try. They were all acting in close harmony, like a repertory company that had been together a long time. You were allowed to watch but they were the only ones who knew the plot. It was as if only they were natives here. Everybody else was just a tourist. She certainly felt like one.

‘You see what I’m saying?’ Jacqui was saying. ‘Just look at them. Romance? They think that’s a long run for their team in the Cup. Don’t waste your time looking for more than sex with them. They can only relate to you from the waist down. They look round the women in this pub, all they see is a lot of convenient spaces. Somewhere they can park their amazing equipment. Till the urge passes. And they can get on with what really matters again. Mainly beer with the boys and football matches. The rest is patter. Just the money in the meter that lets you stay there till you get your business done.’

Jacqui took a bitter gulp of Bacardi and Coke.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘If that’s the game, more than one can play it.’

Kate winced. Some suspicion in her was worried that Jacqui was right. She didn’t want her to be right but almost envied her for her certainty. At least it made her connect directly with the world around her, even if she did it rather abrasively. At least she was dynamic.

She seemed strong. Kate saw her as a kind of Boudicca figure. She drove through situations and her chariot-wheels had blades on them, very sharp blades. So what if some people were hurt? It was mainly men she did the damage to and, post Kevin, she saw them as her enemies. At least she got where she was going. Didn’t she?

Kate always felt that she wasn’t going anywhere. She was hanging about in the anteroom to her own life. If Jacqui was Boudicca, she was the Lady of Shalott. Weaving fancies inside herself and hardly daring to venture out into where things actually happened. Catching echoes of what it might be like.

And Jacqui was honest – often brutally honest, but honest. She wasn’t. But to be honest you had to know what you thought about things. She didn’t. Maybe that was why she accepted so many situations without reacting to them in the way she really wanted to. She hesitated too much. At school she had been the type of pupil who knows the answers but is afraid to put up her hand in case she is wrong and makes a fool of herself. She would have liked to be able to run home, check it out in the World of Knowledge book her father had bought and run back into the classroom with her hand up. She was the type, except with Alison and Jacqui, who was likely to listen to nonsense or swallow a mild insult and postpone a reaction until she had gone back to her room and reprocessed the entire occasion in her head. She always thought exactly what she should have said when there was no one there to say it to.

It was a kind of lying, not having the nerve to own up to the truth of where you were. It was a condition that had become more serious recently. It no longer applied only in incidental moments. It had taken up permanent residence in one particular area of her life. She could still hardly believe that she had lied to Jacqui and Alison about not being a virgin.

That was one of the problems with lying. You spent so much effort sustaining the lie and elaborating on it that you almost began to believe it. There were times, remembering real situations like the one where she had had her pants off, when she could almost convince herself that what had happened was really a kind of sexual intercourse. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t. She was the only supposedly sexually experienced woman she knew with her hymen still intact. At least, she assumed it was. If it wasn’t, and her father insisted the culprit made an honest woman of her, she could probably look forward to marrying a bicycle.

But now she was trapped in the pretence. She knew that in any future conversations with Jacqui and Alison she might have to wheel in another imaginary lover. She had even thought of a couple of names. It was getting ridiculous. There was only one way to stop it: do it for real.

That wasn’t the only reason she wanted shot of her virginity. It was a total embarrassment, like a pimple that never burst. It was so unmodern. She felt she might as well be going about in a bustle and having the vapours. She had to do something. She didn’t know what but she had the vague idea that if she kept putting herself in promising situations it might happen to her before she could stop it. That was one reason she wanted to go to Willowvale. At least it would offer possibilities. A lot of men and a lot of bedrooms. Like her father’s lotto card. Permutations there. But she needed Jacqui to go with her. It might give her the nerve to put herself about a bit more. It would open up the possibilities.

‘And there’s David Cudlipp, of course,’ she said.

She noticed Jacqui and Alison exchange a glance she didn’t understand. Jacqui seemed to become more thoughtful. Kate took it as a hopeful sign. Perhaps she was considering David Cudlipp …

… who was standing in his flat looking through the window down into the street, where one teenager was pushing another along in a supermarket trolley. Both seemed to be shouting some incomprehensible challenge to the street’s residents. David drew back from the window a little in case he became the focus of their marauding arrogance. He remembered a thrown stone coming through the window about a year ago, for no other reason he could see than that the room was lit, with the curtains undrawn, and must have looked like a warm and pleasant place.

We’ve lost the streets, he thought, as he watched the two careen out of sight, bellowing like berserkers. The propriety of home no longer extends outside to walk the pavements sedately. The roughness of the roads invades the house, estranging us from each other within our own walls. Was that really his wife sitting on a chair and using a magazine she wasn’t interested in like a stage prop?

‘So you’re definitely not coming?’ he said.

‘There’s so much to do tomorrow.’

‘We did promise Andrew Lawson.’

‘But what difference does it make? The room will still be taken. It’s just that it’ll become a single instead of a double. At least, I hope so.’

She was smiling at him. He ignored the implication.

‘What do you have to do that’s so important?’

‘My own work has fallen behind in the library. I have to go in. Anyway, it’s not as if I have any significant contribution to make. I’d just be a spectator.’

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Suit yourself.’

He didn’t want to pursue it in case she changed her mind. He thought of Veronica Hill …

… a thought that seemed to be troubling Jacqui.

‘Veronica Hill?’ I thought you said there wasn’t much competition.’

‘There isn’t,’ Alison said.

‘Veronica Hill? She looks like a L’Oréal advert.’

‘But she disqualifies herself. She’ll hardly look at anybody. Let alone talk to them. She doesn’t just come to uni. She makes royal visits.’

‘That’s true.’

‘It’s more people like Marion Gibson and Vikki Kane.’

‘Listen,’ Jacqui said. ‘Vikki Kane could really look something special. She’s got a lovely figure. Good bones. It’s just the clothes she wears.’

The idea of Vikki Kane gave Kate comfort. There was somebody else who didn’t seem to belong in a modern context, so demure and reserved. She was so uncertain of herself it was hard to believe she was in her thirties. Maybe she wasn’t the only Lady of Shalott, Kate thought, as she held in her mind the image of Vikki Kane …

… who was studying herself in the wardrobe mirror.

The white Lycra top and the black jeans looked good on her. The shop assistant had approved in the passing, saying the jeans made her look like one of those photographs where they’ve painted an outfit on somebody. ‘Know what Ah mean. Robbie Williams did it. All he wore was his underpants. And somebody had painted blue jeans on ’im.’

The Lycra moulded itself to her breasts. They had hardly sagged at all. Maybe that was one advantage of having had only one child. Her bum looked firm in the jeans. Maybe her half-hearted visits to the gym, before she abandoned them two or three months ago, had done some good after all. Maybe it was the supportiveness of the cloth. It wasn’t just that clothes could accentuate your good points and minimise the bad ones. Used carefully, they could amount to a kind of temporary cosmetic surgery. These jeans not only made her look more attractively tensile from the back, they also made it hard to imagine the cellulite underneath. Still, if this weekend fulfilled the promise she saw in it, she might have to take them off in company. Love me, love my cellulite. But perhaps by then the shadowy, faceless man would be too preoccupied to notice.

The thought returned her to the glass of white wine on the dressing-table. She took another sip, fully aware of what she was doing. She was keeping her recently acquired sense of abandon topped up. She was grateful now that she had hardly ever drunk. It meant that it didn’t take too much to shift her mood from brooding to carefree. There must be a lot of bottles of self-confidence she could take before any physical damage caught up with her. Whatever she died of, it was unlikely to be cirrhosis of the liver, she thought bitterly.

The idea released her from any self-criticism she might have felt in sitting here, watching herself in the dressing-table mirror as she took the wine. She toasted herself in the glass. If she was going to free herself from dead behaviour, she would have to uncork a few more bottles in the process.

She was missing Jason already. But her worry about him was diminished by the realisation that he seemed perfectly happy to be away from her. When she had phoned for the second time tonight, under the pretence of reminding him that he had forgotten his football boots (although she had known already that he wasn’t going to the training tomorrow), he had seemed impatient with her interruption of his evening. It was almost as if he knew she was just fussing and felt she was an embarrassment to him in his different context, spending the weekend with Alan and his new wife.

There was a strange emotional law in broken marriages, she thought: the one who spends less time with the child or children is the one who is valued more. Wasn’t that a swine of a law? The more time you spent ironing clothes and making packed lunches and helping with homework and nursing colds and delivering them to mud-caked playing-fields on winter mornings, when the wind chafed your cheeks to soreness, the more you merged with the furniture. You became an incidental fixture in their lives, about as sensitively treated as the doormat they usually failed to wipe their feet on. But vanish for weeks at a time and you were much thought of. The rarity of your appearances turned them into greatly appreciated events.

There had been stretches of many months in the three years since they had divorced during which the occasional phone-call from Alan was his only presence in Jason’s life. He had maintained his alimony payments, it was true. But direct contact had been subject to his personal whim. He turned up only when he chose, like a wayward uncle who had so many other things to do. He always arrived with the air of someone doing them a favour. The incredible thing was that Jason seemed to agree with him. He made excuses for his father, no matter how many times he had promised to come and didn’t turn up.

Now Jason seemed to think Christmas had come early when his father suggested they all spend some time together, Alan and Maureen and Jason, to get to know one another. The enthusiasm with which Jason welcomed the idea had hurt her and she was surprised at the jealousy she felt for Maureen. But she had bartered her misgivings in exchange for the time the arrangement gave her to come to terms with the new sense of herself she wanted to find before it was too late. It also gave her next week free for what she had to do.

She leaned close to the mirror and stared into her own eyes, as if waiting to see slowly surface there the confident woman whose clothes she was wearing. She knew she still looked good but she had looked better than this for years and nothing had happened. Could it happen now? It had to. Alan’s remarriage had been one sign. It had been like the final switching-off of what she had come to realise belatedly was a baleful influence on her life, always had been.

She looked across at the dress lying on the bed, its grey cloth so familiar. She put down her glass of wine. She stood up and took off her jeans, laid them lengthwise on the bed, wriggled out of the Lycra top, straightened it out and put it beside the jeans. She turned and looked at herself in the mirror.

The Janet Reger underwear had been her one serious indulgence for this weekend, a bigger one than she could afford. She was glad she had overcome her misgivings about the price. The silk bra and pants made her feel sensuous. Perhaps they would make somebody else feel the same. Sensing tears almost come to her eyes as she contemplated her still attractive breasts so long starved of touch, she fortified herself with wine.

She picked up the grey dress from the bed and slid it over her head, smoothing it down past her hips. She took the broad black belt from the bed and buckled it round her waist. The alterations to the dress had taken the waist in, made it sleeveless and brought the hemline up. With the roll-neck, she thought it made her look like a nun who had broken out of the convent and made a few adjustments to her habit. She smiled to herself. That seemed appropriate. It was the last thing that Alan had bought for her and, in its original box-like style, sleeved and coming below her knees, it had made her look like a nun. ‘Where’s the wimple?’ she had asked him. She ran her hands down the contours that the dress emphasised. The libido strikes back.

She took off the dress and laid it carefully on the bed. She brought the phone across and put it on the dressing-table. She topped up her wine-glass and dialled Marion’s number. Marion answered after a long time, as usual. Vikki sometimes wondered if she was waiting to find out if the caller would give up.

‘Marion. It’s Vikki. You all set?’

‘For what?’

‘The trip. Tomorrow.’

‘Oh, yes. That.’

Even when you were sitting beside her, Marion often gave the impression of not quite being in the same room with you. But tonight she sounded as if she was in another country.

‘You did remember?’ Vikki said.

‘Of course. I’m packed. I wasn’t absolutely sure about going at first.’

‘Marion!’

Vikki immediately set about persuading her. She had phoned to give her own stalled sense of purpose a psychological tow from Marion’s imagined enthusiasm. Now she was dreading catching her inertia. By the time they had finished talking, Marion was saying she would definitely go. But when Vikki put the phone down, the conviction she had managed to impart to Marion seemed to have cost her her own. Aware of how much she might shock Marion, she stared at herself in the mirror, thinking she saw there a belated reveller who was turning up when the party was over. That was when she really cried. Turning the wine into water, she told herself. She let the tears work themselves out. When she looked back into the mirror, the mascara she had applied to have the full effect of her new appearance had spiked itself round her eyes.

Maybe she should be a Goth for the weekend, she thought. That would really shock Marion …

… who was sitting very still, as if imitating the nickname she knew some of the other students had for her: the Mouse. Why had she agreed to go on this trip? It intimidated her. Nearly everything did.

She sat with her cup of coffee going cold in front of her, resting on a copy of Hello! so that it wouldn’t leave a ring on the glass of the table. She wasn’t enjoying the coffee. She had never been sure if she went on buying this brand for the taste or because it had been advertised a while ago on television as part of a romantic serial. Did she imagine it was an elixir? Drink the brand, find the romance. Perhaps romance by proxy was becoming a way of life for her. She glanced at the famous face staring at her past the rim of her cup.

The romance didn’t necessarily have to involve a relationship. That would have been a pleasant bonus but she had ceased to take that possibility seriously some time ago. If she was a mouse, she was a well-fed one. It wasn’t that she thought the not-unpleasant roundness of her figure disqualified her from attracting a man. It was just that, in her experience, it had so far disqualified her from attracting the kind of man to whom she would have been attracted. Being perilously close to forty, she found it difficult to imagine that she would attract him now.

‘The only talent you’ve got,’ her father had told her more than once (as he told her most things more than once), ‘is your stubbornness. And that won’t do you any favours.’

Perhaps it hadn’t. She remembered him lying in his coffin, his face having achieved that expression of unchangeable conviction about the nature of things it seemed to have been rehearsing all his life. Told you I was right, it seemed to say to her as she stood in his dim bedroom with the curtains drawn, and especially about you.

Maybe he had been.

‘People who only want to wear glass slippers always end up barefoot,’ he had told her, more than once.

She reflected what a cruelly sententious man he had been but she stifled the thought, not out of respect for his memory but out of respect for the memories of her own she still hoped to make. She had decided soon after his death that to spend too much time reacting against the powerful effect someone or something had had on you was to recharge that power. You defined yourself against its terms rather than finding your own. It became a continuing necessary part of you instead of something beyond the negative influence of which you could finally go.

Looking at the holiday brochures showing through the glass of the coffee-table, she wondered again if she shouldn’t have spent all the money she once had on travel. Those two months travelling in Europe after her mother’s death could have been extended into her final freedom, she was thinking. She had enjoyed being in strange places so much. Even visiting the bullfight had been an unexpected thrill. Instead, she had been sensible and taken a mortgage on this flat.

Now she had to admit that her money wouldn’t last for ever, unless she saw for ever as a couple of years or so. She had decided already that, if she completed her degree, she wouldn’t be going into teaching. And the idea of being at university as a mature student no longer seemed as attractive as it had done, except for the creative writing class.

Perhaps she could just sell the flat and travel until the money ran out in some foreign place and she quietly brought out the bottle of Valium she had kept as her secret travelling companion. She thought of herself expiring romantically alone, having experienced many places, in a quaint hotel room in Paris or Vienna or Venice. Or Padova. She liked Padova. Especially the little square beside the Basilica of St Anthony. There was a small hotel where, when you closed the shutters, the darkness in the room was total. The staff had been kind to her.

But she couldn’t quite see herself as a romantic heroine. She worried about ring-marks on the table. Her escape from her stifling dissatisfaction with herself would have to be something more practical. She had always known that she would never have eloped without a road-map. She knew, sitting lumpily beside the coffee-table, that she would never be flying to freedom. But maybe she could painstakingly tunnel her way out.

She thought yet again of the box-room. She thought of it as the entrance to her tunnel, had been conscious of it for a long time now as the only place from which she could seriously start. She had lovingly equipped it with the tools she needed. All that was lacking now was the will to begin to use them, the purpose for applying them. Maybe this weekend would help her find it. She rose, took the cup and went to the kitchen to rinse it out.

She went back and sat down on the couch beside the coffee-table. She hoped she had given some reassurance to Vikki, who was so vulnerable just now. But then the operation next week was not something any woman could face with equanimity, especially for someone who, as an only child with her parents dead, had no immediate family.

Vikki was being very brave about it. This weekend was to be her last outing before surgery. As far as Marion was aware, she was the only one Vikki had told about it.

It was interesting how much she knew about the people who were going to Willowvale. Perhaps seeing her as the Mouse (they had never called her that to her face but she was good at eavesdropping), people felt free to say almost anything in front of her. Perhaps they liked to feel they were shocking her. They weren’t. Nothing about people shocked her. Every horror she read about in the newspaper or saw on television she liked to confront calmly because it was telling her the way things were. She had always sent her imagination into situations and experiences she had never known herself, so that she could feel what others felt.

She knew the story of Jacqui Forsyth’s break-up with the apparently appalling Kevin. She suspected from certain remarks Alison Miller had made that she had been involved with David Cudlipp at last year’s weekend. She knew that Andrew Lawson’s life outside university was devoted to his wife, who was housebound with illness. Devoted to her and the bottle, she suspected.

She thought of them a lot. She thought most of Harry Beck. That was inevitable, given that the key to his writing class was mutual honesty, and he led by example. She knew that he had had problems with the book he was working on.

‘I think I’ve discovered a new neurosis. The Penelope Syndrome. You heard of her? She was the wife of Odysseus. While she was waiting for him to get back from Troy … Twenty years it took in all. How do you explain that one to your wife? “That was some traffic jam on the M1.” She was pestered by men who wanted to marry her. Eventually she had to give them a time-limit. She said she would choose a new husband when she finished the tapestry she was working on. Every day they could see her weaving it. Every night she unravelled in secret what she had done during the day. The never-ending tapestry. That’s me. Every night my head unravels my belief in what I’ve written during the day. Just call me Penelope. But not in public, please.’

He had finished it now and had submitted it to a publisher. She had read all his published work, finding his books on Amazon with great difficulty, and that told you a lot about a person, she felt. She had seen him once in a bar called the Ubiquitous Chip. He hadn’t noticed her, of course. But the company he was in had dismayed her. One man in particular looked like a caricature of an aging gigolo. But there was more to Harry Beck than that. Most of the notes on the table in front of her were transcriptions of things he had said.

‘Does it matter? A day or a lifetime. Or one crowded hour of glorious life. I suppose every book creates its own wilful timescale. Certainly, you can’t tell a story without it inhabiting time. Once upon a time, as they used to say. I suppose every story really begins: It was that time when …’ There was a pause. ‘Of course, you could get twenty different people writing about the same event and using that beginning. And still have twenty different stories.’

She leafed through some of her other notes, transcriptions she had extracted from his tutorials, which he had allowed her to tape. She had taken them mainly from the free-ranging chats they always had at the end of a class. She liked those times best. Usually then, with assignments decided, Harry Beck was just responding to their general questions about writing.

‘I don’t think you teach anyone to write, really. You might give them something useful to react against, right enough. That’s healthy. But what we do here is still valuable, I believe. You can let people see their mania is shared. They’re not alone in the padded cell. And, at the very least, it’s going to make you a more appreciative reader.’

‘I can only speak for myself. Writing a book feels for me like trying to ride a bucking bronco. And trying to go somewhere at the same time.’

‘How can you know there’s actually a book there when you start out? I don’t see how you can. I can’t anyway. It’s like a mirage. Sometimes you think you can see it. Sometimes you suspect there’s nothing there. You’re deluding yourself. But you have to keep going. And even once you’ve arrived. I suppose only other people sharing your belief that you’ve arrived somewhere real can confirm it for you. And then, these days, often the people publicly confirming your book’s reality aren’t very real themselves. I think you have to leave it to the individual lay reader. The dread of mirage remains.’

‘Posterity? Who says you can trust posterity? Think about it. This is posterity for all the writers who are dead. And look how undervalued some great writers are today. And how overvalued some chancers are. Nah. You’re on your own. No guarantees. Place your bet.’

She would be taking her notes with her and hoped she would be adding to them and finding out about more people.

‘Mickey Deans is going,’ Kate said.

‘I’ll leave him to you,’ Jacqui said. ‘I don’t rob cradles.’

Kate thought she might not mind. At least he might be more accessible than the men at the bar.

‘Does that mean Donnie Davidson’s going too?’ Alison said.

Jacqui touched both nostrils and sniffed, as if her nose were running.

‘With a truckload of pharmaceuticals.’

Kate realised that Jacqui had just spoken as if she would be going. It was necessary to encourage her with something more.

‘And it’s supposed to be haunted.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Willowvale. It’s supposed to be haunted.’

‘Ooh,’ Jacqui said. ‘There’s an idea. Maybe I could lay the ghost. That would be a first.’

Andrew enjoyed telling his students about the ghost of Willowvale. A recuperating soldier was first to claim he had seen it in 1919. Having turned a corner in the house at dusk, he saw a woman in a floor-length black dress at the end of a long corridor. She had a fierce white face and she appeared to be gliding towards him threateningly – perhaps, Andrew thought, because her dress concealed her feet. The soldier apparently didn’t wait for her to introduce herself.

Having been brought to the public’s attention through an article in a local newspaper and become a tourist attraction after Willowvale was a hotel, the black woman decided to make many more visits. For a time she was something of a fashion. Perhaps people felt they weren’t getting their money’s worth if she didn’t appear for them, rather as if they had gone on a safari holiday and not seen an elephant.

Andrew told his students that she might well be Elspeth Muldoon, the disgruntled wife, come back to express her unexorcised distaste for Muldoon’s folly and to make sure that no jumped-up tourist would be entirely at ease in the place she seems to have hated. Or perhaps she was looking for her dead son, Edward. It wasn’t that Andrew believed in her. His credulity had certainly not been encouraged by the discovery that the soldier who had first seen her had ended up in an asylum. It was just that he thought a ghost might be another inducement to going away for a weekend to talk about books. It wasn’t exactly an indoor swimming-pool but it might help. Considering the diminishing numbers on these trips, he needed all the help he could get.

Also, there was for him a certain appropriateness in the idea of a ghost. He felt Willowvale was, in a way, haunted, though not by a woman in a black dress. It was haunted by something less easy to escape.

Willowvale might be a monument to Edward Muldoon’s failure but it was a big monument. The grand exterior might now be undermined within by small, often gimcrack rooms full of one-night lodgers and squabbling families waiting for good weather, but the grandness of their surroundings made the smallness of their presence all the more questionable.

The real inheritance left by Muldoon’s vision, Andrew came to think, was not the building but the warren of dreams it housed, the inevitably shifting terms our lives have to inhabit but seek constantly to make over into dubious certainty, whether complex or simple, important or trivial. What haunted Willowvale, Andrew believed, was the revenant of human aspirations. What people met in its corridors was perhaps the ghost of something in themselves, the unfulfilled stature of their dreams, looking for flesh.

Ghosts didn’t bother her, Jacqui was thinking. People did. Faced with the living dangers people presented, ghosts were an indulgence. Come to think of it, how many ghosts had she heard of haunting working-class houses? They always seemed to be found wandering through castles and mansions. Maybe there wasn’t room for them in a high-rise flat. Poor people’s lives were too crowded with harsh reality to leave space for a ghost as lodger. They had to give their full attention to the real dangers.

She was doing that now. Standing alone, along from where Kate and Alison were using Alison’s mobile phone, she could hear the sounds of a street-fight coming from somewhere that sounded closer than she wanted it to be. She couldn’t see it yet but it had come nearer in the last minute or so. The swearwords going off like fireworks were louder. The frightening noises (flesh hitting stone?) and the shouted names and instructions were threatening to invade her space.

She shouted along to them, ‘Hurry up.’ Alison nodded but Kate continued talking, presumably to Andrew Lawson. How long did it take to tell him they were going to bloody Willowvale? She was still considering the possibility of backing out when the two of them joined her, laughing and saying it was all fixed.

‘We’d better get home and packed,’ Kate said.

‘It’s no big deal,’ Jacqui said. ‘We’re going for a weekend, not a fortnight.’

‘What’s that?’ Alison said.

‘Something you don’t want to know about,’ Jacqui said, as she led them in the opposite direction from the sounds of violence to look for a taxi.

‘Don’t expect too much to happen till Saturday night,’ Alison said. ‘That’s when the Willowvale effect takes over. It takes that length of time for things to happen.’

Jacqui looked at her.

‘I can hardly wait.’

‘Andrew Lawson,’ Kate said. ‘He sounded as if he wasn’t sure who he was, never mind who I was.’

‘He would be pissed,’ Jacqui said.

‘Unlike us,’ Alison said.

‘I think he was. Or maybe he’d been sleeping. He sounded like that.’

They were laughing.

‘In fact,’ Kate said, ‘I think he’d gone back to sleep before I put the phone down.’

When he woke up, he was still sitting in his chair. Daylight was remaking the furniture. The stiffness in his neck told him reproachfully that he had slept here all night. He waited for his brain-cells to regroup. How long was it since he had checked on Catriona? Hopefully she was still asleep. Oh, hopefully. The fervour of his wish made him feel guilty. This guilt replaced the guilt that she might not be sleeping.

He waited. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was always waiting. For what? For death? But whose death? His or someone else’s? He shied away from a thought that confronted him with guilt yet again. He wondered how he had come to be trapped in such a warren of guilt. He hated guilt, how destructively addictive it could become. It paralysed you. There was an ironic thought. Could you develop paralysis by association, by proximity to the paralysed? The self-pity of the idea was enough to make you feel guilty, he thought, smiling bitterly to himself. He noticed the residue of whisky in the glass beside him.

He knew he was drinking too much. Every glass he took brought questions with it. What if a crisis arose and he was drunk? What if he fell asleep and Catriona needed him? It was as if every impulse had to submit itself to a committee before it could be fulfilled. Even this trip – two nights away with a couple of colleagues and a group of students – spoke quietly to him of selfishness.

At least he was going. This was the one time away he was sure of every year. Perhaps the number of trips he had already taken made it easier to do it again. Perhaps the repetition of an action numbed the guilt of it.

Certainly, most times when he had a desire to do something solely for himself, the intention became so enmeshed in complications of doubt that he usually finished up doing nothing. It was easier that way. Perhaps that’s why his work had become, outside Catriona, so all-consuming in his life. There could be no guilt in that. It was something he had to do for both of them. It was how he could provide a carer for her. It was how he had been able to afford the alterations to the house that took her increasingly limited mobility into account as the disease progressed. It was how he had been able to promise her that she would remain in her own place to the very end.

Beyond Catriona and the university, his life had been, for a long time now, something that took place mainly inside his head. His life, too, had been paralysed in a mild way. He lived among endless circular thoughts that seemed incapable of finding their way through into action. What action? Catriona was there and she needed him more than any other demands on him that he could think of, even those that were born inside himself.

The thought did what such thoughts always did. It overcame his self-pity with the reality of Catriona’s vastly greater suffering. She was the only one of them who had any right to complain about life and she hadn’t done much of that, even when she’d had the means to. Perhaps she couldn’t afford to or she would have gone under more quickly. These days, he was largely guessing about what she felt.

He was wondering now. He put down his glass and went out into the hall. The railings there and the stair-lift attached to the wall struck him as poignant. They had been fitted at different stages of her deterioration. Now even they were useless except as milestones along a dark road she had gone alone.

At the door of the room he paused and listened. There wasn’t even the sound of breathing. He pushed the door open gently. Light filtering through the curtains reached as far as the bed she lay in. He crossed quietly and stood looking down at her.

For a moment he panicked. Then an expression – indicating what, he didn’t know – brushed her face as gently as a cobweb, stirred her features infinitesimally and left them. She was alive.

He watched her. In this flattering light and given the position of her head, the weight loss was somehow minimised. He saw her almost as she had been once. He remembered them making love and was glad he hadn’t been with anyone else since her illness had made them celibate. He knew the gladness had a doubtful basis, was another of those expressions in his life whose meaning he wasn’t sure of. Was it the result of noble self-denial or a lack of sexual drive? He felt the gladness anyway. Perhaps even the gift she was unaware of was still a gift, futile yet an expression of love, like flowers laid at the grave of one of the dead.

Watching her, he felt anew the injustice of what had happened to her. The innocence of her face was no illusion. He had once told her that it took her about three weeks to work out that somebody was being nasty to her, so alien to her was such treatment of others. What had she done to deserve this? Well, at least he knew it couldn’t be too long now.

On that casual day in the kitchen she had begun a life sentence for which there was to be no remission but death. He should complain? He had been no more than a conscientious visitor to her prison.

Nothing he had done entitled him even to believe that he could effectively imagine the refined complexities of her suffering: learning to live within ever narrowing physical limits, so that each agonising adjustment of the spirit was merely a rehearsal for an even more brutal one, and then another; having your sight progressively blurred and your speech progressively muffled little by little; knowing yourself receding gradually behind thicker and thicker walls of silence and stillness and darkness.

He would have kissed her, except that he knew she could have no greater happiness in her life now than sleep, so he gave her the gift of not touching her. He crossed the room, pulled the door to and came downstairs.

The sense of what she had endured and how she had endured it chastened him. He would have his weekend, which she wouldn’t have grudged him, and come back to look after her in the evenings. It had been arranged that Mhairi would stay with her till Sunday. She would soon be here. He would have a quick shower and be ready for the changing of the guard. But first he should give Harry Beck the wake-up call he had asked for. He stood in the hall.

He regretted again that he could never remember phone numbers. He went through to the sitting-room and found the list of people going on the trip. He lifted the phone and dialled. He listened to the relentlessness of the tone drilling into the strangeness of another life.

Someone or something was burrowing towards him. He seemed to be buried alive. He didn’t want to be reached. But his hand had already taken hold on another world before he was fully awake.

‘Yes?’

Who said that? He was lying among ashen light where vague shapes drifted. A mirror floated somewhere, containing a fragment of the ceiling and cornice of a room, a jigsaw piece that didn’t fit anywhere. A voice buzzed in his ear like a trapped midge. It was bothering him.

‘Who?’

‘Harry. It’s Andrew. Andrew Lawson.’

‘Andrew?’

He shook his head, whether to clear it or to deny the name, he didn’t know. He saw some single-masted boats floating on dappled water. That was Argenteuil. But where was he?

‘It’s your wake-up call. It’s eight o’clock.’

‘Hm.’

‘Okay?’

‘Yes. Yes.’

‘See you at nine?’

‘Fine. Thanks. Cheers. Andrew.’

His hand put the receiver down clumsily.

What plans? He had plans? The only plan he had at the moment was to work out where he was. Who had a Monet painting in their bedroom? What he had in his bedroom was a Russell Flint watercolour of nude women bathing in a sheltered waterway in what he had always assumed was Venice. He missed the women’s unselfconscious company. Yet that painting of boats moored at Argenteuil was familiar. He had it in his sitting-room. It was then he remembered that he had switched the prints a couple of days ago. He was in his own bedroom. He was relieved.

The relief was short-lived. He didn’t need painted nudes in his bedroom this morning. He had a real one in his bed. He sat up very carefully and leaned on his elbow to contemplate her as if she were some piece of extra-terrestrial matter that had fallen from the sky. Except that she was very much of this earth, thank God. Any planet she was on couldn’t be such a bad place.

He closed his eyes tightly for several seconds, then opened them wide. She was real. It was the reality of himself he wasn’t sure about. She lay there, effulgent as a lighthouse leading someone lost at sea back to land. He took his bearings from her. Her blonde hair was marvellously dishevelled on the pillow, evoking a raunchy night. Had he been part of it? Her breasts were carelessly displayed above the duvet. A thrown arm leaned against the headboard.

The image of her lying there slowly filtered other images into his mind in fragments, like disjointed scenes from a grainy film that hadn’t been edited yet. He remembered her coming up to him at the party to say she knew his writing. This wasn’t a bad result of literary appreciation: the word made flesh. There was a man who was drunk being persuaded to leave. There were streetlights observed from the darkness of a taxi. He was seeing them through a screen of fair hair. There were coilings in the dark, luminous bodies turning there.

He had been able to make love to her satisfactorily, drunk as he had been. At least, it had seemed satisfactory to him. But, then, he probably hadn’t been the most stringent of judges at the time. He was trying to remember her name. The need to remember developed urgency as her breathing told him that she wasn’t sleeping. Her eyes, opening lazily on him, bright blue, became an accusation.

‘I have to go,’ he said.

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said softly. ‘I didn’t know that writers were on call as well. Like doctors.’

The accent was American. Had she had it last night? She smiled. He caught her mood.

‘People don’t know the half of it,’ he said. ‘My life’s not my own. Us linguistic paramedics have it hard. The language would grind to a halt if it wasn’t for us.’

She shifted slightly. The heavy movement of her breasts made radar contact with his loins.

‘So what is it?’ she said. ‘Emergency parsing?’

He stroked her arm.

‘What it is,’ he said, wishing he could think of something to sustain the levity. ‘I’ve got to deliver a mixed metaphor. Seems to be a tricky one. Sounds like a breech birth. The writer’s in agony. Coffee?’

‘That would be nice.’

She lay watching him as he got out of bed and put on his boxers. He was self-conscious before her eyes, hoping that what had been posing as a battering ram during the night hadn’t turned into a toothpick. He paused on his way out of the bedroom.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How do you take it? The coffee, I mean.’

‘Black, no sugar.’

‘Interesting social inversion, isn’t it? I know how you take sex but not how you take coffee.’

‘Well,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Some of the ways.’

‘There’s more?’

‘Hm.’

‘May I study long at the encyclopedia of your body.’

‘You certainly passed first grade,’ she said.

He saw his kitchen with a stranger’s eyes. It was a shambles. He found it hard to believe that such a small place could contain so much untidiness. Had she been in here last night? He wondered what could possibly have been the point of stacking these empty milk cartons neatly on the draining-board. He understood when he raised the lid of the bin and found it full to overflowing. He crumpled up the cartons and stuffed them ineffectually into the bin. The lid wouldn’t shut properly.

He turned around vaguely in the kitchen, wondering where to start, and saw that there was no way he could finish until he had a spare day to work with. To hell with it. Presumably she had found him out already. Caliban in his cave, living among the debris of his loneliness.

Boiling the water for the coffee, he remembered her name. She was called Mary Sue. She came from New York. He was troubled about something. Staring out of the window, he located it among the leaves of a sycamore tree outside, as surely as if it had been sitting there like a bird, watching him. That was it. He felt too much at ease with her too quickly. Hers was an effortlessly comfortable presence to be in. It was like having known each other already and they had just been waiting for circumstances to get round to introducing them, exchanging names.

The feeling was so strong that he was tempted not to go to Cannamore. That was ridiculous, surely. Decisiveness gelled with the coffee-grounds in the water. He was going, all right. Last night was fine. It was a sweet short story. Why try to turn it into a novel?

When he brought the coffee through, she was sitting in her bra and pants, freshening her makeup. He regretted that. He liked the way she had wakened, with her eye-shadow lewdly wrecked. Courtesan was turning into housewife.

‘Is this all you want?’ he said.

She eyed him questioningly over her compact.

‘More is possible?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I could scrape the mould off some bread and toast it. Or there’s a chocolate biscuit through there we could break with an axe.’

‘I’ll forego the breakfast menu,’ she said, taking the coffee. ‘Thanks.’

‘You’ve obviously seen my kitchen.’

‘Only from the outside. I didn’t want to go in, in case something bit me. But this is lovely.’

‘Okay, smartass,’ he said, getting as close to Humphrey Bogart as he could. ‘You gonna push your luck too far.’

‘Hm. He speaks my language. Almost.’

‘You know I’ve got to go to this weekend thing?’

‘You told me last night.’

‘I did?’

‘Oh, yes. And many other things.’

He waited, wondering what the other things were. She didn’t say. He decided to dress potential embarrassment in more levity.

‘I hope I didn’t mention the three murders I committed?’

‘Three? You only mentioned two. But you can tell me about the other one next time. If there is a next time?’

‘Yes, please.’

He left it at that. By the time he was shaved and dressed and had packed his travelling-bag, she was sitting demurely on the bed, which she had made, finishing her coffee. He checked that his notes were in the bag, then remembered the short story Mickey Deans had given him. He packed the two copies of it with a certain trepidation. He still didn’t know what he was going to say about it. He put his jacket on.

‘Can I drop you?’ he said.

Her eyes widened as she looked at him.

‘Somewhere,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘In a taxi.’

She smiled. That smile could become addictive, he thought.

‘You afraid I’ll ransack the house if you leave me here alone?’

‘Anything you take will be doing me a favour. It’s mostly stuff I can’t be bothered to throw out. I’m just trying to be polite.’

‘After last night, why bother?’

He laughed.

‘Okay. I’ve ordered a taxi. I have to go now. I’ll be happy to drop you at your place if you want. If not, stay here the weekend. My dumpster is your dumpster.’

‘I’ll leave with you,’ she said.

‘You want my number?’

‘I have it.’

‘You’re some machine.’

The taxi sounded its horn and he gestured that he would follow her. At the bottom of the stairs she picked up the mail and passed it to him.

‘Three letters,’ she said. ‘Impressive.’

‘A thin day, my dear,’ he said pompously.

He noted that one was from a publisher. It had a red square on the front advertising a new novel. Surely they wouldn’t have the insensitivity to do that if they were rejecting his novel. He knew the thought was nonsense but he indulged it the way he had indulged himself long ago in avoiding stepping on the cracks in the pavement before an exam. He didn’t know who the other two letters were from. One had a typed address. The other was handwritten in impeccable script. He put all three in his inside pocket. Poste restante. To be left until called for. He decided to try not to open any of them till the weekend was over. If he could fulfil that promise to himself, he decided, the news would be good.