Weekend (28 page)

Then, drifting around the place like the ghost of illusions past, she found his key in the kitchen. Mad? She thought the top of her head would come off. She remembered wishing she could even grow back instantly the hair she had shaved off her legs earlier that evening. When Alison and Kate came round in answer to her phone-calls, they brought more wine and a large supply of fresh perspectives on the departed Kevin, like secret photographs they had been hoarding but had hesitated to show her until now. They formed a drunken coven of witches, each throwing her own ingredients into the pot while they drank, casting spells that made a physical grotesque out of what had previously been a reasonably presentable man.

It was then, in the early hours of a drunken morning, that they remembered how horrible the black hairs sprouting out of his shirt collar had been. His fingernails looked as if Godzilla had been chewing them, didn’t they? And what about the hair? He was still nurturing the thinning remains, but he would have to own up soon. It was lucky for him baldness was a fashion statement these days. Why is it that baldy men need to have such hairy bodies? And what use could he have had for those 32DD tits? He must have made her feel like Mia Farrow.

And it went on. At one point, peering through two bottles of wine, she had felt panic suddenly and wanted them to stop. She explained that she had had a thought. What if he had taken all his clothes to the dry-cleaner’s and would come in any minute now lugging them with him, to find them sitting
here among his dismembered remains? There was a brief waiting silence until the three of them collapsed into raucous laughter.

‘He’s had his coq au vin, then, hasn’t he?’ Alison said. ‘He can lick the plates.’

They all looked at the debris of the meal they had eaten, still lying on the table, and somehow the sight of the empty stew-pot and the greasy plates seemed to them amazingly hilarious and they collapsed again in hysterics. Then Alison came back from a trip to the lavatory, holding up a plain piece of plastic in one hand.

‘Exhibit A,’ she said.

‘That’s his,’ she said, nodding. ‘He’s forgotten his shower-cap.’

‘Maybe he left it towards the rent,’ Kate said. ‘Maybe he wasn’t all bad.’

And that seemed funny as well.

‘Maybe he was afraid the force of the shower would be enough to remove what was left of his hair,’ she said. ‘Like electrolysis.’

‘Shower-cap?’ Alison said. ‘Oh, that’s a pity. I thought maybe I’d found one of his Durex.’

They laughed until she had started to cry and said through her tears that he wasn’t that bad in bed, though. They comforted her and agreed that they would all sleep together tonight.

That was the night their friendship became a mutual protection society and they decided to share a flat. Their solidarity was the wagons in a circle and the rest of the world were the Indians.

Now it was just her against the Indians, it seemed. She wandered about the flat, absorbing its emptiness like a lesson
that had to be learned by someone who was slow of study. It was on her third visit to Alison’s room that she saw the ashtray.

It was made of transparent blue glass, a small curved bowl with one indentation on its rim where a cigarette could sit. Since none of them smoked, they kept it in the kitchen for the use of any visitors with a death-wish who might decide to make a pit-stop here on their way to the grave. It was sitting under Alison’s bed. Its blueness shone faintly in the gloom as she stood at the door.

She switched on the light and crossed the room. Going down on her knees, she pulled the ashtray out from under the bed. She held the bowl in her cupped hands, staring at it like an archaeologist who has made a significant find. Knelt there, she thought she could interpret it. Here was time burnt to an ash that held a litter of cigarette stubs. She counted them. There were eleven. Alison’s weekend reconstructed in her mind. History essays didn’t seem to have been an important part of it. Two people had spent a long time in this bed. She put the ashtray back where it had been. Do not disturb the scene of the crime.

She stayed kneeling in a kind of anti-prayer. There was nothing she could think of that she believed in, not even her friends now. Alison’s praise of Willowvale had been a device to keep her out of the flat. Kate was with Mickey Deans. And David Cudlipp. How much did you have to take before you gave it back? In spades, as Kevin used to say. And he should know.

Why had she expended those useless tears on the bus today? She hadn’t been able to explain herself to any of the people who had tried to console her. For all they knew, she could have been crying for anything. Rape, for example. No,
not rape. That would involve an elaborate court case, the need for incontrovertible proof. But then she could make it clear that she had no wish to pursue the matter in a court of law. She merely felt obliged, for the sake of others, to register the distress her experience had caused her. It was a distress a bus-load of people could vouch for. The university wouldn’t be able to ignore it. Her tears would have a purpose after all.

She straightened up, remembering something else. She stood up. She switched off the light and went to find her partially unpacked bag. She opened it and took out the black satin dress. She examined the tear in it and found it suitably ragged. She laid it over a chair. Exhibit A, right enough. She would finish the letter.

Sitting at the computer, she thought for a moment before resuming typing. It was true that his wife had seen them cuddling as they came into her room. But then sex had only happened after that, hadn’t it? Perhaps it was knowing that his marriage was damaged anyway that had made him take advantage of her. If he was paying the price, why not demand the goods? She began to type.

While Dr Cudlipp was in my room, he forced himself on me. The sex was not consensual. The force used was such that he tore my dress.

Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been sphinxed but don’t let it spoil your weekend.

She paused the tape and started to spool forward. She was looking for a moment during the question time that followed Harry Beck’s lecture. Mickey Deans had asked a question in a tone of such aggression it had stirred the room from somnolence into tension. Eventually she found it.

‘You mentioned in class once that you still regard yourself as a socialist. How is that possible when you have such a jaundiced view of humanity?’

She thought she could almost hear Harry Beck’s sad smile.

‘First thing is, I don’t think it’s jaundiced. I think any kind of hope begins in honestly trying to confront what you see as the truth. That’s all I’ve been trying to do. It’s the darkness of that truth as I see it that makes me a socialist. After all, the dark is where the dawn comes from. I don’t believe in Utopia. You won’t find it on any map we can ever make. And if it did exist, we couldn’t breathe the air there. It would be too pure for us. But I believe in our ability to drift endlessly towards dystopia. We seem to be programmed for it. As if we were saying to ourselves: if we can’t beat the dark, let’s celebrate it. I’m against that. I’m a dystopian socialist. Socialism is an attempt to share as justly as we can with one another the terms of human experience. Don’t do the dark’s work for it. If it’s only void out there, let’s write our own defiant meaning on it. And make it a shared meaning. I think believing in good is the good. Against all the odds. Even if I’m part of the odds against us. I think it’s what makes us what we are.’

She switched the machine off. She had finished her research, as she liked to call it. Tomorrow would be a good day to start. But she remembered reading somewhere about a writer who said in an interview that the moment he had finished one book he wrote the first sentence of the next. John Masters, she thought his name was. The fact that he had started a new project, however briefly, seemed to guarantee that he would at least continue with it. She liked that idea and her first sentence had already shaped itself in her mind. She would fix it in its place tonight.

But she sat on a little longer, slowly arranging the papers in front of her into categories for convenient reference. She was tired. She had managed a little sleep on the bus to the ferry but the fuss that was being made of Jacqui Forsyth meant that any sleep she had was only fitful. She had noticed that one person who had seemed conspicuously uninvolved in whatever crisis Jacqui was going through was David Cudlipp. He had read the passing scenery like a whodunit. She had managed to get more sleep on the ferry and on the bus back to Glasgow. The woman in the room hadn’t travelled with them. She wondered why. That was interesting.

Sitting back, she looked at her ordered notes. The work would be difficult and she felt no certainty that she would succeed. But her loneliness had developed a determination and ferocious persistence in learning all sorts of different skills, physically and mentally. There had been no one else to rely on but herself. Stubbornness was her main gift. Even her father would have given her that.

It was all he would have given her, she thought, but perhaps it was enough to let her work her way out of the meagre sense of self in which he had for years tried to entrap her.

She had seen that entrapment close inescapably round her
mother and her two brothers after her father died. She understood it with her mother. She had been a mill-girl who married a bank teller after meeting him at the dancing and becoming pregnant by him. He condescended to marry her. She became a mixture of awe and guilt, which he could play on for the rest of their life together.

Her mother had been so innocent of the nature of all things academic that she had come to ascribe a formidable intellectuality to someone who had managed to get a job in a bank and then become the manager of a small branch. Her mother’s tragedy was that her husband agreed with her assessment. Instead of freeing her kindly from her preposterous over-estimation of his abilities, he had locked her inside it, became the jailer of her innocence. Slowly her potential to grow on her own terms had withered.

That tyrannical authoritarianism became a domestic necessity for him, one which extended to his children. He hadn’t achieved his authority by shouting or bullying. He had achieved it by small subversions of the spirit. He shook his head at their opinions. His mouth curled in distaste at their turns of phrase. He explained in a long-suffering way to their mother what she really meant. ‘Give me strength,’ he said into his soup. He wondered how Michael and Thomas would ever make a living. He couldn’t understand where Marion had acquired her stodginess of body. At least her mother was slim. Most effectively of all, when he was displeased with any of his children, which was every day, he would stare at their mother in a way Marion had learned to interpret. She took it to mean irreparable sadness at how the purity of his bloodline had been polluted.

It was as if no thought that happened in his house could be taken seriously that did not have his approval stamped on it.
He had literally, she thought, staring at the viscous surface of her coffee, intimidated all of them out of their minds. In her case, she thought sadly, he had intimidated her out of her body as well.

Her mother had learned to live in the corners of herself his arrogance allowed her. She wondered if her mother had managed to nurture any hidden dreams for herself she kept out of his reach, like pets she fed in secret and took out to stroke when he was asleep. She couldn’t imagine so, since after his death her mother had become the keeper of his spurious reputation. ‘Your father would have said …’ she said. ‘That’s one thing about him …’ she said. The one thing was usually an enormity gilded by time and offered as a virtue. ‘He never looked at another woman,’ her mother said. In case the truth about himself looked back, Marion thought. What other woman would have given his ego such unfettered freedom to act as it wished?

Her brothers and she hadn’t helped. Perhaps he had got to them too early, dismantled the means of effective rebellion before they even knew they would have need of them. Denied belief in their academic abilities, Michael and Thomas had recourse to expressing themselves physically. They became enthusiastic rugby players at school, as if they could only succeed in an area which was alien to their father. Sport was a foreign country to him, full of a primitivism he found distasteful. But his contempt was less potent there since sport spoke a frivolous language he obviously couldn’t understand.

She herself had only one method of resistance against him. It was sullenly and defiantly to become what he thought of her, she had decided on looking back. That must have been why she left school at sixteen and went to work in a shop. If he saw her as one of life’s menials, she would act like one. She
let the banality of her life close round her like a fortress. Since she made no attempt to disprove what he thought of her, she became invulnerable to his contempt. More than that, she was able to retaliate by giving him back his sense of her, which was so obviously painful to him.

It was how she had survived the daily attrition of her self-confidence. None of the rest of her family had. Once their brief and none too successful prime as amateur rugby players was over, Michael and Thomas seemed to return their spirits to his keeping, drip-fed daily on his disappointment. Michael was an alcoholic in his early thirties. Thomas became a security guard in a shopping precinct, an occupation which was seen as a deliberate and pointed insult. Their father declined swiftly in retirement. He died having cast himself in the role of some biblical patriarch, looking on in wise and helpless sorrow at the ruin of his tribe.

What annoyed her most was how death had sanctified the cruelty of his life not only with her mother but with his sons. His shallowness of mind became unspoken wisdom. The emptiness of his heart turned into the sternness of the just. Her mother and her brothers made a conspiracy of three against the brutal truth of what their family life had been. Perhaps that way they didn’t have to admit to the guilt of their weak acquiescence in the stunting of their own lives.