Remedy is None (2 page)

‘Through these scapegoats a corrupt community is shriven.’

Professor Aird shuffled his notes and took off his glasses, looking round the students. Charlie liked these moments. The professor could express more with his face than with words. Charlie remembered the time he had demolished the Chicago school of critics with one eloquent eyebrow. Now his face seemed to express regret at the atavism which put food before Shakespeare.

‘Dinner is served,’ he said.

There was a respectful pause as he left the rostrum and headed for the door of his side-room. But before he could escape he was ambushed by three girls with ears asinine for learning. Those less dedicated made for the door.

Andy was one of the first to get out. He raced across the quadrangle and through the cloisters, dodging students and moaning, ‘Food, food!’ Jim and Charlie came up with him at the top of the hill and fell into step. University Avenue was busy and they walked quickly, knowing there would be a queue at the Union.

Jim held out an invisible microphone to Andy and said, ‘And would you like to tell the viewers something about the life of a chimera in our day and age? Would you recommend it to others?’

Andy assumed what were apparently the rough tones of the professional chimera.

‘It’s like any other work, really. Ah mean we do a lot that isny appreciatit by the public, ye know? We have our own kinna more or less union, certainly. N.I.C. National Incorporatit Chimeras. But, eh, Ah personally would like tae see chimeras gettin’ the vote. Ah mean tae say . . .’

But Jim suddenly lost interest in chimeras and gave his attention to a tight-skirted girl just ahead. As they came abreast of her, he fell into step with her, smiling inanely into her face.

“Excuse me, modom,’ he said, twirling an imaginary moustache. ‘Could I carry your briefs-case for you?’

She gave him a chilly look and his smile went stalagmite. Then he ran after Charlie and Andy with a gust of demonic laughter.

‘You better watch it, freen,’ Charlie said to him as he caught up. ‘You’ll get what yon other wit got that spoke tae the lassie with the sweater.’

‘What was that?’ Jim asked.

‘The royal order of the boot.’

‘Ye mean sent down?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Just for talkin’? He musta been some talker right enough. What did he say, like?’

‘Well, she had oan this sweater. Ye know? Which I am led to believe she was causing to protrude in two places. And directly over the left hoodjykaplonk –’ Charlie made a vague mamillary gesture – ‘she had neatly inscribed the initial “T” – no doubt referring to her monnicker. Well, this very witty fella comes up to her and says “What do ye get out the other one – coffee?” There you are. Bob’s yer uncle, and farewell to the student life.’

Jim rasped his tongue derisively.

‘And the band played believe-it-if-you-like,’ he said.

They had reached the Union. It was crowded already. Many groups were standing about in the hall, chatting. Andy gripped Charlie’s arm.

‘Come on downstairs with me,’ he said, ‘till Ah get ma sandwiches out the locker.’

They all went down to where the lockers were, beside the toilets. While Andy was opening the locker, somebody tapped Charlie’s shoulder on the way past. It was Alec Redmond.

‘Yes, Charles,’ he said. ‘Working hard?’

‘Hullo, Alec. Oh it’s the old Trojan stuff, definitely.’

‘Oh here, Charlie.’

Alec was half-turned in the doorway of the toilets. He snapped his fingers.

‘Mickey – the porter – told me there was a telegram just come for ye,’ he threw back as he went on.

Charlie’s first thought was, God, that’s what you call premature. He was convinced it must be from Mary. He turned round abruptly to go up and get it when he bumped into Mickey, who was holding the telegram.

‘Ah seen yese cornin’ in therr,’ he said, ‘an’ Ah thought Ah better get this to ye as fast as possible. It’s like fightin’ yer wey through Hampden Park up therr.’

‘Thanks, Mickey,’ Charlie said, taking it.

The name looked strangely formal – Mr Charles Grant. He couldn’t find a way into it at first.

‘Ach aye,’ somebody said philosophically on his way past to the toilets, ‘in one end and out the other’.

Charlie managed to get it open and unfolded it. He was so sure of what it was going to say that at first all he could understand was that this was not the message he had anticipated. Spelled out on the strips of pasted paper, as if from some malevolence that wished to remain anonymous, were the words:
FATHER DYING, COME HOME AT ONCE. JOHN
. Slowly, Charlie brought his mind into focus. The first thing he thought was that he couldn’t take his lunch here, but would have to leave right away. Then he thought he might have to leave university. Then he thought that he would see Mary sooner than the week-end. On the heels of these came shame that he should have thought of them at all. But it was almost impossible to grasp what these words meant. He stared at the
message again. The words seemed to buckle, distend elastically, defy meaning. How could this piece of paper he held in his hand above the tessellated floor, with people shouldering past him, come to mean so much?
FATHER DYING
. Father dying? With people talking and laughing and Andy closing up his locker and giving it a parting slap as if it were something animate and Jim putting his hand on his arm? Father dying?

‘What is it, Charlie?’ Jim said. ‘What’s the matter?’

Charlie enunciated the words gradually, as if telling himself as well as Jim and Andy.

‘My father’s dying,’ he said.

In one of the toilets someone was singing, ‘Hear my song, Violetta.’

Chapter 2

‘
ARE YOU SURE YOU HAVE EVERYTHING, NOW? AND
whatever you do be sure and write as soon as you get there and tell us if everything’s all right. Your father and me’ll be worried until we know for sure.’

‘Yes, Mother, yes,’ the young woman said through the small opening in the window. She had slid back the pane, and her mother stood on the platform outside, hopping with maternal solicitude in case the guard should flag short her advice. ‘Now don’t worry about me. You would think I was going to the North Pole. I’ll be perfectly all right. Oh, excuse me. I’ll shift that,’ she said, lifting her hat from the seat opposite hers and putting it on the rack above her head beside the new tan suitcase.

Charlie sat down on the cleared seat like a somnambulist. He hadn’t noticed the hat. He hadn’t noticed much between the university and the railway-station, only spasmodic and incomprehensible fragments of what was going on around him, an Underground map, a mother nursing her child on her knee, a ticket-collector’s hands clustered with warts. These things occurred as shapes and shadows against his frosted perception, threatened dimly without admittance. His awareness had frozen on the fact of his father dying, and impressions only skimmed the surface of his consciousness like skaters seen from underneath the ice. He still couldn’t realize it.
FATHER DYING
. Two words that detonated in his mind, exploding his concentration to smithereens, and left him searching the debris for fragments of understanding. How could he be dying? He had seemed all right the last time Charlie was home. But that was more than a month ago. Did people pass from apparent health to imminent death in a month? It seemed somehow unjust, somehow too casual.
Death was something august and terrible, a climactic presence heralded by long illness. How could it come suddenly, unannounced like this, ensconce itself in your house behind your back? It was a possibility Charlie had never really contemplated. It wasn’t easy to start contemplating it now. But he tried to adjust to the fact towards which he was moving relentlessly.

The train exhaled steam and lunged forward, leaving the young woman’s mother to run a few paces along the platform, throwing snippets of advice that the wind scattered like confetti. The young woman closed the pane with a sigh of relief and sank into her seat. She looked at Charlie, shaking her head, trying to form an alliance of understanding with him on the difficulties of having mothers. Charlie stared past her through the window. The old woman in the corner opposite them looked across deliberately, appointing herself chaperone while the young woman unbuttoned her costume jacket to reveal a lace blouse. The compartment door slid open and three businessmen came in, laughing. The youngest of them chose the seat beside Charlie so that he was facing towards the young woman. They had an air of mildly alcoholic carnival about them, as if they were wearing paper hats. One of the older men was smoking a cigar and its lengthening ash stayed miraculously intact in defiance of his gestures. He was telling a joke, the climax of which was imparted in a whisper that punched their heads back, leaving them groggy with laughter. The youngest one directed his laughter at the young woman, taking a side glance at Charlie to check the competition.

Charlie’s impassivity made it obvious that he wasn’t entering. As the train gathered momentum, he strove to analyse what the news meant to him. With the numbness of the initial blow wearing off, his mind prodded tenderly at the pain, trying to determine the extent of the damage. There were certain obvious consequences. He might have to leave university. They had been very tight for money as it was. There was the house to keep. With only himself and Elizabeth living in
it, that wouldn’t be easy. At eighteen, Elizabeth wasn’t making much of a wage. The mess he had made with Mary was going to be impossibly complicated. It was some time to get pregnant.

But these were merely abrasions. The sheer fact of his father’s dying must cut a lot deeper than that. He was almost afraid to examine it to the marrow. He thought tentatively what it would mean to lose his father. He tried to consider it not in the practical terms, but simply in human ones. At first, in the absence of any definite reaction to something so unassimilable, his mind struck a vague, eclectic attitude towards it, one derived from dim, subliminal sources. Death was a terrible and awesome thing. Without any experience of it, he knew that. It was the ultimate mystery, recurrent theme of poets and preachers. His thinking had been subtly conditioned to endorse a vague, idealized image of it by what he had read in books and seen in films and overheard in occasional muted references. As a boy, he had been aware of it as a furtive presence in adult conversations, accompanied by lowered voices or significant looks or suggestions that he go out and play, as if this was too fiercesome an ogre to be admitted to the understanding of a child. He had witnessed the heroism of countless cinematic deaths from decorously positioned arrows or invisible bullets, which caused the lifeblood to bloom as formally as a flower on the victim’s breast, while angelic voices choired man’s majesty and the glycerine grief of women registered irreparable loss. And he had seen most of them at an age when the moment of lonely communion in the dark was still too powerful to be dispelled by the need to evade ‘God save the Queen’ or by the glib cynicism of the foyer. He had learned of death’s stature at secondhand from the broodings of the Metaphysicals and the declamations of Shakespeare. Now he was to meet his magnificence in person.

But, sitting in this compartment – death’s mobile anteroom – with the insistence of the wheels imposing their practical rhythm on his thoughts, what gradually impressed itself on
his mind was simply the depressing ordinariness of it all. There was no sense of grandeur about it. Nothing was any different. The random chords of the day did not combine into any impressive overture to death, but remained casually dissonant. In a station they passed through, a porter lounged in the doorway of a waiting-room, picking his teeth. Two horses stood immobile in a field, distinguishable from statues only by tail and mane. Everything that could be seen, through the patch Charlie’s hand had automatically cleared in the misted glass, was the same as ever. Was this how death happened, in the middle of a bright day that was too busy to notice? It was somehow shocking. What made it worse was that Charlie’s shock included himself. He was like a child who has closed his eyes against the imminent pain of a doctor’s touch, and opens them again in disbelief, surprised to find that it can hurt so little.

He was ashamed of himself, ashamed not because he had dreaded pain, but because his feelings didn’t justify that dread. How could he be so callous? How could he have been so callous in the past? For this callousness must have developed gradually in his relationship with his father, and was like a hard skin formed on his affection. How had it happened? He seemed hardly to have thought about his father as himself for as long as he could remember. The selfishness of it was shattering. He had known the last time he was home that his father had been X-rayed, but he had somehow assumed that it had been all right. His father had been very off-hand about what he called ‘just a check-up’, probably because he didn’t want to disturb Charlie’s studies. To Charlie’s father, ‘the studying’ was sacrosanct, a mysterious activity involving some miraculous act of concentration. And Charlie had let himself be convinced that there was nothing to worry about. The truth was that in the last few days his own problems had left no room for his father’s in his mind. But that was no excuse. For a long time now, he had been concerned almost exclusively with himself, living his separate life in Glasgow. It was so easy to become isolated. He had an
established routine and it was a pleasant one. His only real worries had been examinations. And they were the kind you could defer until they gathered in one week and were over the next. The rest of the time he enjoyed just being a student. Certainly, he could have gone home more often. He thought again of how long it was since he had been home. Over a month, and it was only a short train journey away. But he had discussed it with his father and Elizabeth, and they had all decided that with important class examinations coming up it would be a good idea for him to stay in Glasgow and work at the week-ends. Mary had agreed reluctantly. She had come up to Glasgow for the day once or twice since then. It might have been better if she hadn’t, he reflected ruefully.