‘James!’ Eleanor struck like a cobra. ‘You said James was the bad one. The black sheep.’
‘Black sheep?’ Raymond sparred for time, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘Who the hell mentioned sheep? James. That’s the third son that’s a minister.’
‘No. That’s not what you said.’ Eleanor mounted righteousness and went into battle. ‘You said James was the womanizer. I can remember exactly what you said, Smart Alec. You said the three sons who were ministers were Peter and Paul and . . .’ she said, and slid indecorously from the saddle.
Raymond let her squirm in silence for a moment before he went on with devastating contempt, ‘Thank you, Lesley Welsh. The Memory Woman. Well. As I was saying . . .
‘So the father says, “Good morning, James.” “Good morning, Father. Good morning, Peter. Good morning, David.” ’
‘David?’ Eleanor asked the ceiling, as if appealing for Jove’s thunderbolt of justice.
‘David!’ Raymond ground out the name on a mill-wheel of determination that crushed all opposition, ‘ “Good morning, David.” So that’s the four ministers standing in front of the fire. They’re all standing there. The four of them. In a line.’ Raymond was playing for time, obviously rattled. His eyes had a hunted look. But he had to go on. ‘They’re all there. When Andrew comes in. “Good ’
‘God!’ Eleanor exchanged martyrdom for denunciation. ‘Andrew! Are you sure it wasn’t Bathsheba? Or Uriah? Uriah the Heep.’
‘Look!’ Raymond threw words at her blindly, like stones from the rubble of his thoughts. ‘Damnit. To hell. Who’s telling the joke? What difference does it make? I’ll call him what the hell I like. Admiral bloody Nelson if it suits me.’
‘Fine, fine, that’s right,’ Eleanor soothed, like a nurse dealing with a fractious mental patient, rubbing him very gently the wrong way. ‘That’s a clever attitude. Keep that up and they’ll give you a little padded cell where you can tell yourself jokes for the rest of your life. Because you’ll be the only one who knows what they’re all about. What’s the point of telling a joke if you can’t make sense of it? Why do you bother?’
‘God knows why I bother!’ Raymond’s anger was more orderly now, having found a familiar flag under which to rally. ‘When you’re in the company, God knows why. Because when did I ever get to finishing a bloody story? When? Smart Alexis has to butt in. Always has to throw a spanner in the works.’
‘It’s not a spanner I’m throwing. It’s a life-belt.’
‘Life-belt? You always manage to kill them, anyway.’
‘It’s what’s called euthanasia.’
‘It’s a pity your mother didn’t know about it.’
Peter got to his feet suddenly and pretended to do a soft-shoe shuffle.
‘There will be a short intermission,’ he announced. ‘During which I will endeavour to entertain the company. Patrons are asked not to leave their seats. We are getting the fire under control.’
The sprinkling of forced laughter Peter elicited managed to dampen tempers down a little. He took the opportunity to pass round cigarettes like toys to soothe unruly children. There was an awkward pause, broken at last by Eleanor, who managed, by her air of saving a situation single-handed, to convey the impression that Raymond was alone responsible, although she was the one who bravely made amends.
‘It must be wonderful, though,’ she said in a false, determined voice, very deliberately ignoring Raymond, and leaving him to smoulder in the ruins of his self-esteem. ‘I mean to be able just to go abroad like that. For a long holiday. That’s where you’re so fortunate, Jane. But then you don’t have any children to worry about.’
Neither did she, as it happened. But every holiday-time, she acted as what she called ‘foster-aunt’ to a family of children from an orphanage. Just for a few days. To give them a taste of home-life, she said. Presumably to let them see that they weren’t missing much. She had never had any children of her own. She compensated by playing at being maternal once or twice a year, but not long enough for it to become a nuisance. She made a great deal of it. Mrs Whitmore had wondered before if she only did it in order to give herself a certain conversational status. Certainly, she managed to get round to it at some point of every evening, and always with a remark that was directed at Mrs Whitmore. Mrs Whitmore felt that it might be a deliberate attempt to bait her, but she couldn’t be sure. She had grown so touchy on that subject too that she could not be certain her own assiduity was not translating unthinking remarks into predetermined insults. Either way, it wasn’t the kind of remark calculated to make her feel any more at home with them. She had a depressing vision of growing old among people like this, with whom she had no real contact, for whom she had no real concern, strangers acquainted only with the surface of herself. It was a very sad and a very lonely feeling, from which the future seemed to stretch away like an empty echoing corridor, with only casual meetings to interrupt her progress towards the door at the end of it.
‘I thought I was in hell there. This is what it must be like. A place where you can’t see the fire for ministers.’
Everybody looked in an almost alarmed way at Raymond, as if he had gone quietly off his head. At least his words saved Mrs Whitmore the trouble of having to listen to Eleanor on the subject of part-time maternity.
‘That’s it,’ Raymond said. ‘The punch-line of the joke. For what it’s worth. Although it’s more like an epitaph now.’
There was a sound of something being dropped into the hall.
‘That’ll be your magazines, Peter,’ Mrs Whitmore said, seizing the opportunity. ‘I’ll just bring them in.’
As she crossed the living-room, Peter laughed a consolatory laugh, and said, ‘Oh yes. Very good.’
Mrs Whitmore closed the living-room door with a sense of tremendous relief. She stood for a moment, letting the soothing insistence of the hall-clock massage some of the tension from herself. The magazines lay on the carpet, illumined dimly from the lamp above the door. She crossed and picked them up, riffling them automatically until she came to the local newspaper she still had sent to her, although the locality it served was no longer hers. She glanced at its front page absently and halted, staring in an action that echoed that moment in the bedroom, her eyes held by a name in the deaths column. She closed the paper again at once, as if trying to shut out the thought it gave rise to in her mind. But she was too late. The thought was already there, emerging from a confused welter of sadness and regret and guilt and hope, riding them determinedly. It entered her mindfully realized, bringing her a kind of hope she had tried to live without, seeming to bear with it the answer to the alienation she felt with people like Raymond and Eleanor and sometimes even with Peter himself, seeming to offer her an alternative to that long bleak corridor. She was going to take it. This moment with the dim light striking across her in the darkened hall and with the magazines clutched in her hand was like a small miracle to her, the intervention of a benevolent fate. She was not going to let it pass from her. She knew what she was going to do. Yet she knew that she must achieve it by indirection, for it depended upon Peter’s consent and assistance. She must first set about ensuring that and she would do it as circumspectly as she would go about obtaining money from him for an expensive dress. She stood a moment longer in the conspiratorial shadows before she concealed the newspaper carefully among the magazines and moved casually towards the living-room door.
Chapter 8
‘AYE, IT’S A SAD BUSINESS RIGHT ENOUGH, CHARLIE,’ MR Atkinson was saying. ‘He wisny an auld man by any manner of means. An’ there’s a lot we could have done without before yer feyther. But there it is, son. Facts are chiels that winna ding. Ye’ve got tae cut your coat according to yer claith. It’s no’ easy. But it maun be done.’
Charlie found himself wondering what he was doing here, listening to these words of trite consolation. Atkinson’s Book of Proverbs for Everyday Use. Had he come here to be consoled? He felt a little ashamed that he should have inflicted himse
lf on Mr Atkinson. What right did he have to be standing in this office, letting himself be laved with sympathy? Because Mr Atkinson knew his father and liked him? Because he had worked here during the last university holidays and Mr Atkinson had been nice to him, taking him out of the cement factory and letting him work in the office?
While Mr Atkinson waxed philosophical on the vagaries of fate, Charlie couldn’t help feeling that his words were out of place here, like a lectern in a washroom. He looked round the familiar precincts of the poky office, with the teapot and the blue-hooped cups filed under Z and the skewered invoices and the bathing belle with the blood of a dead fly on her bosom, epitaph on insect lechery, keeping her smile fixed through the falling months. He remembered pleasant moments spent in this place, making weak jokes and strong tea, doing crosswords, reading prescribed texts and getting paid for it. Had he come back here looking for the same uncomplicated casualness? It was still here all right, in this sunlit little room, in the sound of the kettle on the gas-ring, in Mr Atkinson’s even voice that made death a troublesome commonplace.
‘Ye’ll get over it all right, Charlie. Everybody does. It comes to the best of us. Just give it time, son. There’s nothing we canny take, just given time.’
Was that what he had wanted, kindly platitudes of consolation from the uninvolved? Why had he come here at all? The question was as familiar to him as his hand, seemed to be put by everything he did. So often in the past two or three weeks since he had stopped going up to university, he had gone to places that had pleasant nostalgic associations for him, to the pictures, to the library, to the café he used to go to with Mary, and now here to see Mr Atkinson. And every visit seemed to end in the same question mark. What was he doing here? What was he looking for? It was as if in each place he had been looking for something that would restore him to himself, a means to re-enter his old way of life. It was in a way a pathetic act of faith, a sort of romantic gesture, a search for the one accident of fable that resolves all problems and makes everything all right. Within himself he knew that he wasn’t going to find it. But he had persisted in trying, because to do so had at least the negative virtue of postponing something else which he knew he would have to do. It was something seemingly trivial in itself and yet something he shrank from doing because of the implications it contained of binding him even more closely to the burden of his father’s death. Every time he had left the house it had been with the intention of doing it, and every time he had allowed himself to be sidetracked into going somewhere else in the forlorn hope of finding there escape from what he feared was waiting in that other place. But there was no escape, and he would have to face it. His hand fingered the key that had lain unused in his pocket for so long.
‘Everything’ll sort itself out, though, Charlie. The mills of God grind slowly, but they do grind extra small.’
Some of the men were loading a lorry in the yard outside and their banter provided obscene interpolations to Mr Atkinson’s text. Charlie had never heard him talking like this before. About the most personal things he had known about Mr Atkinson were that he was keen on the garden and his wife suffered from migraine. There was something a little ridiculous about the sententious way he was talking, and Charlie felt guilty about it. What other way could you talk about somebody else’s grief in which you were compelled to show some concern? It was Charlie’s fault. He shouldn’t have come here in the first place. How long was he going to go on trying to find a way out of his own commitments? This was his concern. He would have to cope with it himself instead of farming it out to people like Mr Atkinson. It was no use trying to atone for his father’s death by proxy. His hand tightened round the key.
‘Ah’d better get away now, Mr Atkinson,’ he said. ‘Ah just thought Ah’d drop in an’ see ye.’
Mr Atkinson had crossed to where the kettle was, having rinsed out the teapot at the tap by the door.
‘Hing on a minute, Charlie,’ he said. ‘We can have a cup o’ tea. It’s nearly ma dinner-time. But Ah can always squeeze in a mouthful o’ tea.’
‘Naw. Thanks all the same. But Ah’ll be gettin’ ma lunch directly, anyway.’
‘Well. Ah’ve enjoyed seem’ ye again, son. Look in any time ye’re passin’. Look after yerself. An’ see an’ stick in at the college. Yer feyther wid have wanted ye tae dae that.’
‘Right, Mr Atkinson. Thanks. Ah’ll be seein’ ye.’
‘Cheerio, Charlie.’
Charlie emerged into the cold of the day and walked out through the big gate, seeing the loaded lorry parked just inside them, with the driver eating his lunch in the lofty cabin and drinking tea from a flask-cup. As Charlie passed, the driver nodded down to him, raising his cup.
‘This is me having ma high tea,’ he shouted indistinctly through the open door, and laughed a barrage of breadcrumbs at his own joke.
Charlie waved applause.
He came down the hill from the factory into the busier streets that were beginning to quicken with people having their lunch-hour. He ran his finger along the key as if it was a memorandum. He would go today. But he would have lunch first. The clock on the Laigh Kirk said it was some time after twelve. He decided to go and eat in the caf6 where he had lunched when he was working with Mr Atkinson. Another detour. But this would be his last.
The café was nearly full but he managed to get one of the small tables for two near the open fire. It was the same waitress who had always served him before.
‘Hullo, stranger,’ she said. ‘Where’ve you been hiding yerself? Don’t tell me ye’ve fallen for some other waitress?’
Charlie found himself answering in the same vein.
‘Secret mission,’ he mouthed. ‘M.I.5. But keep it under yer apron.’
She chaffed him about it, and they kept it going, building it up as she moved back and forth to the tables. It turned out that it was Russia he had been to, and by the time she fetched his cake he had brought her back a pair of Cossack boots that laced up to the thighs and he was to get putting them on her himself. After that an elderly woman sat down opposite him at the table and her presence cut the line between them. She kept looking at Charlie every so often with a certain suspicion, and then she would pull her open coat more closely round her body as if Charlie was too young to be enjoying such delights. As a cover for his embarrassment, Charlie took the letter out of his pocket again and read it, as he had done countless times. It was like one of those pieces of translation he used to do at school from Latin or French, when you knew what all the words meant and it still didn’t have any meaning for you because the idiom was foreign to you. It had the same quality of irrelevant remoteness and as he looked through it he was more conscious of the meticulous script, up light and down heavy, than of the words it conveyed.
Darling,
It’s here at last. You can stop worrying. Thank heaven. If it had gone on any longer I think my mother was bound to notice something. Something was bound to have told her. And, just between you and I, it would probably have been me. I was getting more worried every day. It seems a bit silly now. But like my father says, women need worry the way a car needs petrol. I must have used gallons in the last few days. But that’s it over, thank heaven.
Are you happy now? I can’t wait to see you again. When are you coming back down? Write and tell me it’s tomorrow. It seems like ages since you were down last. What has Shakespeare got that I haven’t got? If you can come down for the week-end, Elspeth and Ted want to go to a dinner-dance with us. I think Elspeth has her eye on you. So if you come down, I’m going to keep a padlock on you. Give Shakespeare the blind for one night. Can you not?
I’ll have to stop now. I’m writing this during my tea-break. I brought the writing-paper and stuff with me when I found out the good news this morning (and I don’t mean about the dinner-dance). I just wanted to tell you everything was all right and to tell you that I love you. There, I’ve told you.
Come down this week-end. Will you?
I love you, darling,<
br />
Mary
It was like a dead letter to Charlie, one delivered too late to someone who had left no forwarding address. She obviously hadn’t known about his father’s death at the time of writing. The letter had been addressed to the flat in Glasgow and had been redirected by Jim and Andy. But somehow the person it was meant for had gone missing in the interim. All Charlie could get out of it was a sense of incredulity about the things he must have bothered about just a few weeks ago. Had he really been so distraught about that false alarm? It seemed so insignificant now. Mary’s letter, with its archness and its exaggerated proclamation of relief, seemed to satirize what he had felt, so that its importance was deflated, banalized by a few grammatical errors. It was unbelievable that he could have been so worried about it. But perhaps you made your own worries and it was all comparative. He could remember that even when he was a boy there always seemed to be some central worry occupying him at any given time. For a week or two it would be the darkness of his room at night. He would forget that and it would be the boy who lived at the corner of the street and whom he was afraid to pass. Vagrant worries came and went, stayed for a few minutes, for an hour, or for a day, like whether earwigs really went in your ear or not, or whether God could really see you anywhere you were, even under the bedclothes. But always there would be some official worry which he seemed to have in permanent residence. It never really proved to be the case that it was with him for good, but at the time it invariably seemed like that, and it never seemed to leave until another had arrived. And as he had grown older, he hadn’t really changed. He had simply entertained a higher quality of worry, like whether he was going to pass his examinations or like this one about Mary. Now these too seemed utterly trivial, ousted as they had been by his involvement in his father’s death. They had been no more than regents for this one, and now that it had assumed complete authority over him, it dismissed everything else from his mind as being irrelevant to its purpose. It precluded all other concerns. Everything else seemed trivial and pointless. He had not been in touch with Mary since receiving the letter, indeed, since first hearing of his father’s illness. He couldn’t bring himself to see her. He had nothing to say, no emotion left over to expend on her, and he felt guilty. He hoped she would simply allow the whole thing to peter out. It would be easier for both of them that way. He had intended to go and see her and explain, but he dreaded coming face to face with her anger or her hurt or whatever artillery she could bring against him, for he had nothing with which to oppose it, only a hollow where his feelings should have been. And he wasn’t sure that he could trust himself yet to be honest enough to end it in her presence. He might accept the old relationship again as a means of hiding from the meaning of his father’s death. As if to protect himself from any such temptation, he crumpled the letter in his hand, leaned across, and threw it into the fire glowing beside him. That small gesture was a symbolic act for him, and he watched the letter burn to nothing as if the fire were performing crude surgery on himself, obviating infection.
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