Weekend (13 page)

He walked to the front and told Andrew he wanted to read something. Andrew’s introduction made the natural mistake of assuming it was something he had written himself. The students greeted Harry generously. It might have been just how he was feeling at the time but he thought he could detect some gentle jeers among the cheers.

‘I’m going to read a story,’ he said.

The applause broke out again. He waited.

‘It’s not my story. It’s a student’s story. I didn’t give him a
very good review when I was talking to him about it. I think I was wrong.’

He had them then. Officialdom divesting in public to reveal the frailty of itself is not without its interest. Casual attention had become concentration on a hoped-for emotional striptease.

‘I’m reading it without his permission. I hope he’ll forgive me. The student’s name is Mickey Deans. The story is called “Brass”. You can let him know what
you
think.’

He read it. He found he was reading it very well. His audience – Mickey’s audience – was held. Not a dismissive expression stirring. He was surprised how well he knew the story, how accurate his shifting intonations were. A benign part of him, a survivor from the generosity he used to have, must have been reading the story a lot more appreciatively than the failed writer in him was able to. Maybe he was curing himself of reader’s block.

When he reached the sentence relating to the husband’s feelings about the potted plant, some mouths were open. It was about then that he almost lost his rhythm. He suddenly noticed Mickey Deans standing at the back of the lounge. The blue eyes were on him like lasers. He managed not to atomise.

The ending caused a long pause in the audience. Their faces sat in parenthesis for several seconds. Then they got it. They liked what they got. The applause was real. Word passed among them that Mickey was there. Several people rose and went to congratulate him, until he was standing among a small crowd.

He came from behind the table and walked towards Mickey. He waited patiently. He noticed that Mickey had a black eye. When the others were dispersing, he gave the pages to Mickey.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘This belongs to you. It’s worth keeping. Maybe I should be the one with the black eye. I think I misjudged it. I couldn’t have written anything as good as this at your age. It’s a pretty melancholy accolade, but it’s meant as one.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Is it okay to have read it?’

Mickey nodded towards the people around him.

‘Well, it is now,’ he said.

Before any more could be said – something for which Harry felt perhaps he was glad – a strange thing happened. Marion Gibson, known not unaffectionately among some students as the Mouse, had taken the microphone from its stand and was giving an unaccompanied rendition of ‘Hey, Big Spender’. The lounge was amazed into silence, staring at her with an intensity born of the need to verify that what was happening was really what was happening. It was like watching a demure spinster suddenly doing a can-can on a coffee-table. It holds you.

Remembering Marion Gibson’s performance, Harry discovered he was smiling inanely into the darkness. The action of the smile ambushed his solemnity, became the cause of a mood rather than the result of one. Wasn’t life incorrigibly various? Just when your pomposity was in danger of turning you into your own statue, life dropped birdshit on your head. Thank you, Marion.

He swung his legs out of bed. All that had happened was that another publisher had rejected his novel. There were plenty more where they came from. It wasn’t cancer. It occurred to him that he had been so paralysed by the news of his rejection he hadn’t even opened his other two letters. They might be good news. He could use one of those
messages life sometimes sent, telling you things were all right.

They were stopped at the lights. Through the rear window of the car in front a hugely fat man was staring at them, with a Baby on Board sticker beside his head. There was no sign of a baby.

‘I wouldn’t fancy changing
his
nappy,’ David said.

Sandra laughed and her laughter seemed to crystallise the mood she was in. The sound was a spontaneous confirmation of the happiness they were sharing in the car, a conspiracy of two from which the pointless balefulness of the fat man was excluded. They were going to have Sunday lunch at Peter and Myra’s in Langbank. It was bright and hot, the kind of day that always reminded her of childhood, a segment of sunny innocence kept in storage for her from the past. They would have cold wine in the garden and eat there and talk pleasantly about their lives. Last night they had made love at what she had worked out was the best time in her cycle. If things went well, she might have a baby on board herself soon enough, though she thought she could live without the sticker. What were people without children supposed to have on their cars? No Baby on Board – Ram Me If You Like?

Fidgety with pleasure, she aimlessly pressed the button of the glove compartment. As the door came down, something small and bright that flashed in the sunlight rolled slowly out. As it dropped over the edge of the door, she caught it in her hand. It was metallic. She opened her hand, letting the object nestle in her palm.

‘What have we here?’ she said jocularly.

‘What’s that?’

He glanced across, released the handbrake and put the car into gear.

‘It’s a lipstick,’ she said, just realising it herself.

‘Surprise, surprise. Must be yours.’

She didn’t recognise it. She unscrewed the cap and looked at the stub.

‘This isn’t mine,’ she said.

‘Who else’s would it be?’

‘This isn’t mine.’

‘How can you tell?’

‘I would never use this colour.’

‘Well, neither would I.’

‘David. Who does this belong to?’

‘Listen. If it’s not yours, who the hell’s is it? You use the car as well. Maybe you should tell me.’

‘Whose is it?’

‘Hold on a minute,’ he said. ‘This fat bastard’s getting on my mammaries. He hasn’t stopped staring at us. I’m beginning to think he’s a cardboard cut-out.’

He pulled out slightly, checking if he could overtake. He let one car pass in the other direction and swung into the middle of the road. There was a car coming towards them but he put his foot down. The sudden panic she felt in the next few seconds left her wondering if she would be found dead with the lipstick in her hand. She thought irrelevantly that they might think it was hers, and the colour was awful. As he drove back on to their side of the road, the car he had just missed that was coming towards them and the car he had cut in front of blared their horns.

‘Piss off,’ he screamed. And then in a quiet, if shaky
voice, ‘Might make the fat bastard sweat off a few pounds anyway.’

He maintained his speed, leaving the car behind far in his wake. While she waited for her flock of startled nerves to settle again into quiet indignation, he spoke.

‘Oh, wait a minute,’ he said. ‘I know whose that is. Jean Hadley’s. It must be hers.’

She was a secretary in the English department. Sandra had met her once briefly at a departmental get-together. She hadn’t seemed the type who would favour post-box red.

‘So how does it come to be here?’

‘Look. I gave her a lift. She was going into the town and she asked if I could drop her.’

‘Where? I wouldn’t have thought this was Jean Hadley’s style.’

‘I wouldn’t know. But she was going for a night out with her girlfriends. When I stopped to drop her off, she decided to freshen the warpaint. It was only after she was away I noticed that lying on the floor.’

‘So how did it come to be in the glove compartment?’

‘Jesus, Sandra. What d’you think? I slung it in there to give to her later. Must’ve forgotten all about it.’

‘But you said you thought it was mine.’

‘Because I forgot about the whole thing, I’m telling you. It’s a bloody lipstick. You think I made a note of it in my diary?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Jesus, what is this? I can’t believe you.’

He drove in silence for a time while she turned the lipstick over in her fingers. Suddenly, he swerved into a lay-by, stopped, wrenched on the handbrake and sat staring through the windscreen.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘You think if I was going to play away from home, I’d pick Jean Hadley? No offence to Jean. But I would think the only cock she’s ever seen was in a farmyard. Think about it.’

‘It’s funny you didn’t think of this right away. That it was Jean Hadley’s.’

‘I’m not exactly Aristotle. But I hope I’ve got more to think about than a bloody lipstick. Okay. Imagine I’m having a mad affair with Jean. You better imagine it for the both of us. There are places my limited imagination just can’t reach. But there we are. Having it off all over the place. Given that scenario. You think I’m going to put her lipstick carefully in the glove compartment? Think about it.’

‘But you’re the only one that’s saying it’s Jean Hadley’s.’

A car tooted at them as it passed and she recognised it as the one they had overtaken.

‘Drive carefully,’ he shouted. ‘Into a fucking brick wall.’

He sighed.

‘I see,’ he said. ‘The plot thickens. Now it’s somebody else I’m screwing. Or maybe many somebody elses. Who knows? You don’t believe me, do you?’

He sighed again.

‘Okay, Sandra. Tell you what. You keep that lipstick. And tomorrow you phone Jean Hadley at the office. You explain to her where you found it. Ask her to verify that it’s hers. Question her about the night I gave her the lift. Once she passes the test, you can give it back to me and I’ll return it. God, it’s going to be one embarrassing situation. But if it puts your mind at rest, let’s do it.’

He leaned across and kissed her.

‘Okay?’

She made a rueful face at him. He kissed her again.

‘If that’s what it takes for us to trust each other,’ he said, ‘let’s do it.’

She put the lipstick back into the glove compartment and closed the door.

‘When you give it back to her,’ she said, ‘don’t mention what bad taste she’s got.’

They both smiled.

It had been a good day at Peter and Myra’s, she remembered, but what stayed with her most vividly about that day was the small shiny object she had unearthed from her thoughts. She contemplated it again, wondering what it was telling her about her past. She never saw it after that day. He said he had given it back to Jean Hadley. She had never checked the truth of his statement. She had met Jean Hadley again much later but it had seemed ridiculous to revert to her suspicions after all that time and, besides, things were particularly good with David and her then.

Now she wondered. Had he suddenly decided to overtake the car to give himself time to think up a story? Had he embarrassed her into burying her misgivings? How many other times had he diverted her from the truth about their marriage with which she was now confronted? There must be others.

To find the man who seems completely socialised we have to turn to Mr Utterson. And a dismal prospect he offers us. The name forewarns us of what we will find there. He is an utter son – someone conditioned from birth, it seems, to obey all the rules he has been taught. He is hardly more than a
collection of negative conventions. He can only live so successfully within society by the continuing total negation of his natural self. He has a ‘rugged countenance, that was never lighted by a smile’. Presumably because a smile would be too dangerously spontaneous, an ambush of relaxation, the consequences of which cannot be foreseen or controlled. ‘He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone, to mortify the taste for vintages; and though he enjoyed the theatre, had not crossed the doors of one for twenty years.’ This man lives by negatives. He drinks gin not because he likes it but because it controls the pleasure he takes in wine. Because he likes the theatre, he makes a rule of never going there. He lives in a cage which he has made for himself and which requires the maintenance of his constant vigilance. This cage locks from the inside.

He was weeping. It was a strange feeling. It was something he thought he had forgotten how to do. The tears came without warning, welling from some mysterious source, like a spring in dead soil. All he could do was let them happen and wonder where they came from. He didn’t understand his tears. He simply felt the wisdom of his eyes in weeping.

His mind couldn’t leave it at that. Like a fussy undertaker at a funeral, it was trying to give his grief a practical form. His betrayal of Catriona was appalling. What did a lifetime of being faithful to her mean if he could subvert it in a moment? Perhaps that he had never really had the opportunity before. In one weekend he had made a nonsense of his life. It hadn’t
meant what he thought it meant. That was surely cause enough for crying.

But it was more than that, he knew, which had made him an overweight, aging man sitting in his underpants crying in a hotel room. It wasn’t just Catriona he was crying for. Catriona would never know. He would always know. Perhaps he was crying for himself.

The guilt he had always felt about Catriona had multiplied into contradictory feelings like opposing armies. They seemed to be fighting one another to the death in him, and he could see no victory.

Just as he was guilty of betraying Catriona, he was guilty of betraying the potential of his own life over so many years. He looked at Vikki sleeping. This was what he had denied for so long after the time it could have made any difference to Catriona. His celibacy hadn’t been serving her. It had been serving a dead sense of himself. You didn’t help someone who was on breaking ground by joining them there. You needed to stay on the firm ground of yourself to hold them up. He had gone down with Catriona. He felt as hopelessly shut off from possibilities as she was.

He had destroyed what he had thought was the meaning of his life with Catriona but he could see no other meaning. He had pretended to Vikki to offer more than he had to offer. He was old, older than his years said he was, and the feelings that would make a meaningful relationship for a woman he did not believe he could find in himself any more. And, even if he could find them, he did not believe he could sustain them. The weekend had implied a promise he couldn’t keep.