Weekend (6 page)

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.