Weekend (17 page)

Her face was flushed. He was warm too. He eased himself out of his jacket, removing first one arm from her and then the other, wriggling awkwardly out of the sleeves, so that he was always touching her. The jacket lay on the floor beside the briefcase.

‘She is, she is,’ he said.

‘It’s unbelievable.’

‘Seems to be her mission in life.’

‘That must be several times every day.’

They were looking into each other’s eyes. He smiled slowly.

‘Will you do that for me, I wonder,’ he said.

‘You’d have to fix the nameplate first,’ she said.

They laughed. When he had tried to put up a nameplate, he had used the screw-holes that were already there. He had invited her out on to the landing to witness the ceremony. When he closed the door to get the full effect, the nameplate fell on to the doormat.

‘I will,’ he said. ‘When I get hold of a bit.’

‘Yes, but our nameplate’s plastic’

‘We can change that. Incredible, though. How long’s he dead?’

‘Three years, she told me. Said they had been married fifty-eight years. Fifty-eight years. This is our anniversary, by the way. Three months today.’

‘Is that a record?’ he said. ‘Let’s celebrate.’

He stood up and pulled her out of her chair. They kissed
again and his hands were moving gently, rediscovering the strangeness of her body. She laid her head against his chest. She could see late sunlight illuminating the small room. It enriched the new furniture, seemed to deepen the colour of the wood.

‘I like this place,’ she said softly.

‘It’ll do for now,’ he said. ‘Until we get the mansion.’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe this is as happy as we’ll be.’

‘It’ll just get better.’

‘I like this place,’ she said softly.

‘Let me show you the best room,’ he said.

They moved awkwardly, rubbing against each other, towards the door. In the hallway, she took his hand.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘I want to see her.’

She led him along to the front door. She peered through the spy-hole. She saw Mrs Fawcett, distorted through the lens, rubbing furiously at the brass nameplate that said ‘Alexander Fawcett’. Mrs Fawcett was, she knew, a small, frail seventy-nine-year-old woman whose wrinkled face suggested the unimaginable places she had been. But from here she seemed enlarged, a monument to endurance of feeling.

‘Look, look,’ she said.

He dutifully looked, one hand stroking her back. He turned back towards her and nodded.

‘Uh-huh,’ he said.

‘It gives you faith, doesn’t it?’ she said.

‘I’ve got that anyway,’ he said.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

She took one last look.

‘Come on, darlin’,’ he said.

‘Aw,’ she said. ‘She’s going back in.’

Mrs Fawcett closed the door. She went through to the kitchen and put the aerosol tin and the cloth in the cupboard under the sink, settling them in their familiar place that was easy for her to reach. She washed her hands slowly and thoroughly and dried them carefully. She smelled her fingers to make sure all trace of the polish was removed.

She took the crystal milk-jug from its cupboard. She filled it with water from the cold tap. She went through to her living-room and crossed to the potted plant where her husband’s ashes were mixed with the soil. She watered the plant gently and lovingly. She went back through to the kitchen, dried the milk-jug, replaced it in the cupboard and put the carefully folded towel in its place on the lower edge of the spice rack.

She came through to the living-room and sat in the chair that had been her husband’s. She glanced contentedly round the room from which all visible trace of her husband’s presence had been removed. She smiled as she looked at the potted plant, which was a flower her husband had hated more than any other. She remembered again how she had read somewhere that, for the Egyptians, to remove a man’s name from his funeral tablet was to kill his soul. She thought of the words ‘Alexander Fawcett’ dissolving in brass. She smiled to herself.

She lifted the evening paper which had been delivered, found her glasses and started to read.

After sitting holding them for a while, Kate put the three sheets of typescript down on the desk. She aligned them carefully, squaring the corners. She did it with care, for they
seemed to her a part of the inside of Mickey’s head and that was a place with which she thought she was falling in love. The body wasn’t bad either.

She looked across at him. He was spreadeagled on the bed. Sleep had hit him like a car. The duvet was pushed down to his waist. With only torso, arms and head visible, he lay like a piece of broken sculpture. But the rest of him was there all right. She smiled slyly at the proof she had of that. The first light of morning coming through the closed curtains had the effect of the Vaseline she had heard could be put on a camera lens. The moment was soft focus. He would never look better than this, she was sure. Even the black eye merely increased his appearance of vulnerability. The hair would never be darker and the contours of his face would never be cleaner. The sense of time frozen was enhanced by the utter stillness outside. She felt she could hear for miles but there was nothing to listen to except her thoughts.

So this was love? It made her feel strange, as if she had just been introduced to herself. Pleased to meet me. This time would never come again and she would savour it. You could only feel this once. She felt double somehow. She felt her identity more intensely than she had ever done and she felt simultaneously distanced from it in a pleasant way. She was both inside her name and outside it. It was like being within the main character of a story, so that sometimes she occurred in the third person in sentences someone else seemed to be saying.

Kate Foster lost her virginity at Willowvale
.

It had a good sound to her. She was glad it had happened here. It had the edge on having lost it up a tenement close in Glasgow. Willowvale. It made it more romantic. Willowvale. Wuthering Heights. Manderley. Not Busby. Dennistoun. Auchenshuggle. Even the exact circumstances in which it
had happened, although they might seem pretty tawdry to other people, were for her drenched in such a cascade of unfamiliar feelings, all she remembered was sensation. Place dematerialised.

The moment when the unimaginable suddenly loomed into possibility, she knew now, was when Mickey switched off the light. Their conversation had been the innocent approach to a place she had sometimes felt she might never reach. She was aware at the time of how unusual the way they were talking was. It would have needed an act of will to take their eyes off each other. They were like people who had met after a long separation and were happy to find each other again. She was telling him things she hardly remembered knowing about herself. Self-conscious mannerisms evaporated. She knew what she thought about lots of things she had assumed she wasn’t sure of. He confirmed them and expanded on them and made them his own feelings. Ideas came out of them like fireworks.

Suddenly they paused. They could hear people talking in the darkened bar next door. She was offended, as if someone were spying on them, invading a space that belonged to them alone. Mickey put his hand on the back of her chair, leaned across her and switched off the single light that was burning beside them. Straightening up, he let his right hand come to rest on her shoulder and left it there. As she stared at him in the semi-darkness, he put his left forefinger to his lips and smiled. It seemed to her the most beautiful smile she had ever seen.

They sat staring at each other. Their eyes were a conspiracy of silence that lasted while they heard people come out of the bar and walk along the corridor and begin to go up the stairs. Mickey’s right hand moved to the back of her head. It rested
very gently there, touching her hair. Her breathing paused. He leaned off his chair on to his knees in front of her and his tilted head came slowly towards her and they kissed.

What followed, she imagined, was what going over Niagara two to a barrel might be like. The long gentleness of that first kiss exploded into furious, thrashing activity that took them along with it wherever it was going. They were on the carpet together, doing things she didn’t know could be done, like the swift removal of knickers while sitting on the floor. She had no experience of unbuckling a man’s belt but she learned instinctively. The hard heat of his body was shockingly exciting. When he went into her, the room did cartwheels. She found how enjoyable indignity could be, lying with her legs grappling his hips. Above her his head butted like a gentle beast.

She was left with warmth inside her. It hadn’t taken long. It happened to her like newsflashes from another self. But, as some news can, it had changed things. That was what she mainly felt. The woman lying on the floor was never quite to be the same one who had been sitting on the chair minutes ago. She watched him as he leaned over her on one arm. She was surprised to see how diffident he looked.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’

He was staring at the floor.

She eased herself up past him and, in the glow from a porch light outside, saw what appeared to be blood on the carpet. It wasn’t much. It was only then she remembered how slight the pain had been, breaking into pleasure almost immediately. Was that what all the fuss had been about? It seemed so little. She thought that perhaps her suspicions, during those times of physical exertion, that her hymen might have been damaged hadn’t been unfounded. Maybe she had partly lost her cherry to the saddle of a bicycle or a tree. But this was better.

‘I’d better clean it up,’ she said.

His arm went round her and they sat there almost naked, holding each other. It was good to sit there, letting what had happened solidify from event into fact, and feel the sweat frost on her skin. The dark lounge seemed staid around them, its chairs and tables still rigidly in place throughout the room. It was good to have defied their rectitude.

‘Just leave that,’ he said, his face against hers as he nodded towards the blood. ‘What can they think? That somebody cut their finger? They couldn’t work out the truth of it in a year.’ She burrowed into his neck and giggled. His left arm closed like a velvet clamp around her body. ‘Anyway, I like it there. We’ll always know it was there. And what it really means. It’s our memorial. Kate and Mickey were here.’

She shivered pleasantly against him.

‘Let’s get you to bed,’ he said quietly.

It was then she first thought that she might be in love. It was as if the sex hadn’t been something separate from the rest of the time they had together. It was an expression of a continuity. It was still a kind of sex when he found her pants for her and watched her dress and had his arm round her coming up the stairs and let her into his room and they lay naked in the single bed together, talking for hours before she fell asleep. Wherever Donnie was, she was glad he wasn’t here. Tonight in bed (last night in bed, she thought, aware of the growing light) they had made love again.
Kate Foster made love
. She thought she could get addicted to that. But it was to the presence of him she knew she could become most addicted. It enabled her to be more herself. She throve on it. She had never known how interesting she could be till she saw it in his face.

She looked at him still sleeping. She was in no hurry to
wake him up. She wanted to inventory the amazingness of this weekend. It was the fullest time she could remember experiencing. In two days she seemed to have amassed a library of new feelings. She wanted to browse among them. How could you be sure it had happened if you couldn’t keep it? But they had talked about so much it wasn’t easy.

Mickey Deans explained to Kate Foster about his black eye
.

That was when he had left her before the Free-for-all began, saying he wouldn’t be long. He was going to try to find Donnie Davidson. Donnie had brought his own pharmacy with him and Mickey was worried. He might try to swim the Atlantic in his underwear. Or decide the nearest pub was Tombstone and he was Wyatt Earp. He could go crazy on the stuff he took.

Mickey told her that he did find him in the nearest pub. Donnie had an unlit cigar. Mickey knew that wasn’t a particularly good sign since Donnie didn’t smoke. Nicotine, according to Donnie, was the only drug that was completely pointless. He was using the cigar like a prop, brandishing it extravagantly. Three young local men were standing round him.

‘And then, of course,’ Donnie was saying, ‘the old man took to the drink. It was a catastrophic decline. We lost the entire estate. Twenty-five thousand acres. And so I stand before you, gentlemen. A cultured pauper.’

One of the three young men made a wide-eyed face at the other two.

‘Is that right?’ one of the other two said.

Mickey understood immediately what was going to happen if he didn’t manage to stop it.

‘It’s funny,’ Mickey told Kate, ‘how something you’ve read ages ago can suddenly explain a situation you’re in. It’s like a flash of lightning or something. And you can see so clearly.’

What Mickey had read, he told her, was something about Edwin Booth. It was his brother, John Wilkes Booth, who had shot Abraham Lincoln. Anyway, Edwin Booth once played Richard the Third in front of a lot of miners in the backwoods somewhere. Edwin must have done it well. Because after the play a mob of miners were waiting outside to get him. They thought he
was
Richard the Third, an evil bastard. Edwin had to be spirited away before the miners got their hands on him.

What Mickey saw was that the three locals didn’t know this was theatre. They didn’t know that this was what Donnie did, go off on ridiculous verbal excursions and pretend to be somebody he wasn’t. They didn’t understand that he was taking the piss out of himself. They thought he was taking the piss out of
them
.

‘Donnie,’ Mickey said.

Donnie’s head travelled in a gracious arc, his eyes tracing a line along the ceiling until they had landed on Mickey’s face.

‘Michael,’ Donnie said. ‘My friend. I’ve just been telling the chaps here about our family misfortune. They have seemed intrigued.’