Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  Sitting there in casual camaraderie and wearing their youth like a uniform, they made Charlie nostalgic for the past of a few weeks ago. He could recall like a distant memory when he had been like them. He understood exactly the sense of communal identity they drew from each other. It was not the identity you have from being a member of a family or living in a certain place, but that which, if you are young, you share with everyone else who is young with you. It was the superficial yet binding bond between people enlisted in the same rank of circumstance, when you form your own exclusive group with its own tricks of speech and passwords, and its habits of thought, and everyone else is just a civilian; when your personality has not yet been demobilized into that of a private individual and is still submerged in that of youth. He remembered the feeling. He remembered especially Saturday nights like that, when his behaviour must have corresponded to that of a million other young men and his actions seemed to take place in a sort of generic tense.

  The pattern of so many such Saturdays came back to mind, a pattern that must have been obeyed by so many young men besides himself, automatically, unquestioningly, as if it had been coded through their blood, the orders of the day to which they responded en masse. Early in the evening, the compulsion came on you, like a distant bugle. You washed and shaved with special care and felt good with a fresh clean shirt against your skin.

  When you got to the dance-hall, you checked in your coat and went to the toilets to comb your hair. There would be a group of young men there, talking gallous, already drunk on one part whisky and nine parts determination, exorcizing the timidity of John and Joe and instilling themselves with the fearless spirit of Johnnie Walker. When you came out the band would be at the stage of quiet perspiration and the drummer would be hunched in that professional attitude of ecstatic boredom that must be stipulated by the Drummers* Union. From then on you divided your time between the stag line and dancing. You learned to categorize your partners roughly. About the worst thing that could happen was that she might be a singer. ‘I was waltzing one night in Kentucky ... ta-ra-ra-ra ... too sune ... and the bee-eutiful Kentucky mune.’ Running this a close second in the Boredom Stakes, was a congenital hummer so that, dancing, you felt as if you had a hive on for a hat. You established contact in various places and tried to consolidate and assess during the evening, by the scouting pressure of a hand or the suave brush of lips on the forehead at the dance’s end. And between sorties you returned to the peacock patter of the knots of apprentice men, talk puffed up with hyperbole and gaudy with swearwords.

  ‘Hell! Talk about walk. She lives at the North Pole. Igloo-Strasse. Knock three times and ask for Chinook. An’ fur whit? Ye winch her fur a year, and then maybe ye get tae put yer haun’ on her left lug. A write-off, definitely.’

  ‘Jist at that meenit her auld man comes out, ken? Doing his Willie Winkie, ken? Wearin’ his stupit pyjamas. See aboot every two meenits efter that? He shoves his neb oot like a cuckoo-clock tae tell us the time. Ah politely puked an’ left. Ah felt like askin’ him whit he wanted tae be when he grew up, or givin’ him a bob to lose himself.’

  ‘Look. Ye’re wrong! Ah know fur facts ye’re wrong. Dempsey never seen Mickey Walker, never mind fighting him. Dempsey took the title off Lewis Firpo, an’ he was a heavyweight. Mickey Walker was a bloody middle-weight. Ten stone seven. An’ Ah’ve got the books in the hoose tae prove it.’

  ‘Ye shoulda been with us last night, boy. Fantabulous. One of the most best nights known to man. Ah don’t remember a thing.’

  So the night would pass, a hothouse of pleasant sensations, small seeds of fact blooming from inspired mouths into exotic fictions, mascara’d eyes ogling over shoulders, cigarette smoke veining dark corners, neat bottoms bobbing into sight, only to submerge again in a sea of bodies, artesian laughter suddenly unstopped, until you began to notice fewer people in the toilets and more room on the floor. And reading the signs of the night working to a close, with the body of dancers now in slower revolution like a wheel running down, and many stilled altogether, holding each other, swaying slightly like plants in a gently breathing wind, and girls with their heads drooped bouffant on their partners’ shoulders like dying flowers, and the faint musk of perfumed sweat, and the drift beginning towards the door, couples leaving with collars up, the boys lean waiting, weaving minute silvered webs of cigarette smoke till their girls come clicking to them, swathed in raincoats and fresh powder, magnetizing the swivelling attention of the lobby-loungers with a whiff of perfumed promise that says ‘Don’t you wish it was you?’ and then mounting the stairs hand-in-hand until the big door is unbarred and swung open and with the sputter of a cigarette-stub in a puddle and a clack of eager heels they are gone.

  You would walk with her, enjoying the tingle of strangeness, the first fumbling verbal contacts, making conversation out of a puddle you had to skirt or a drunk man coming towards you, steering her subtly towards one of the familiar parts of the geography of your relationships with girls, where you felt more confident – the archway leading to disused stables where when it rained you stood in a dry arch of darkness with a beaded curtain of rain on each side of you, or the Burns Monument in the park, a building deft at darknesses, giving sudden black shadows, shallow but deep, which shut behind you like a door, so that someone standing a yard away couldn’t tell you from the brick, a building sworn into the freemasonry of courters, that mushroomed lovers in its shadows after dark, under stairways, in clefts and corners, while above them the Bard stood in stone, conniving with the moon, his hand raised in apparent benediction of their efforts, smiling, and, when the sun rose, revealing nothing to the respectful visitors who came to do obeisance to a dozen dusty, illegible books and a score of faded prints.

  Once there, you might talk a while. Sometimes talk wasn’t very necessary. But sometimes it was and wouldn’t come, and the situation would freeze on you. At other times sudden intimacies sprang up in the crevices of darkness like tropical flowers, the sweeter for their transcience, the richer because you felt you wouldn’t always be capable of such sudden depth of contact with a girl. You could talk about pictures, people, places, anything, and what you said seemed to matter entirely. Nothing was trivial. Things you had done or known were rediscovered in her reaction to them, and you were surprised to find how interesting they were.

  You would talk and kiss and go off into a twin trance, lost in each other, grown together like statues shaped from a single piece of clay, until the chaperoning owl hooted the night and the trees back into your awareness and the poplared avenue beneath you laid with moonlight, down which you would be able to see the lake ringed with lamps whose lights were elongated, wavering in the water like tapers of cold fire, and you would embrace and kiss and become industriously involved in each other again, happy in the collisions of your flesh and the feel of wall on hand and the smell of hair and the taste of mouths, and would break off from time to time to talk or smoke or just stand happy, and would start again and stop, continuing and leaving off casually and deliciously, with conversation growing in the interstices of your activity.

  You continued, wrestling pleasantly, resting between rounds, and the decision would vary from girl to girl. You would walk her home, usually in the region of midnight, and wait at her door until an irate mother or father, depending on whether the household was matriarchal or patriarchal, called or appeared. Then you came up home alone with most of the town asleep and a pleasant taste of morning in your mouth.

  He let the memory of it leave him, dissipate like a dream, facing him with the café. The waitress had started to stack chairs on the cleared tables with a noise that was a reprimand in its loudness. Only he and the young men remained as small islands of vanishing Friday in an encroaching sea of Saturday. Tomorrow no doubt they would be following the same pattern as always. But he didn’t have any pattern to follow, no ready-made means of expressing himself. Saturday meant nothing to him. It used to mean Mary. But he had put an end to that.

  He sat
feeling as if more than one Friday was ending in the café clock telling the time invisibly behind its steamed face, a burst of laughter and a jabber of Italian from the back-shop, and he had the feeling of having put dust covers on so many areas of his life and of having isolated himself from many people. It was as if he was deliberately preparing himself for something he knew was going to happen. But what it was, he didn’t know.

  Chapter 13

  FROM HER TABLE IN THE CORNER OF THE TEA-ROOM, Mrs Whitmore was watching the door intently, with a nervousness that was almost adolescent. She wanted to see Peter’s expression as soon as he entered the room. She became irritated by an unidentified stickiness somewhere in her right hand. Giving it a detachment of her attention, she found it was a fragment of the cream cake she had eaten, and extradited it to the ashtray. It reminded her that she hadn’t washed her hands or renewed her make-up, and she wondered if she still had time. She checked her watch. The football would have been over for twenty minutes. Allowing Peter half an hour to get here, she still had ten minutes. The doorway was still empty. Leaving her umbrella hooked on the chair to deputize for a ‘reserved’ sign, she went out into the side corridor and along to the ladies’ room.

  It was a bit scruffy, but it would do. She hurriedly bathed her face and dried it and applied fresh make-up. She had to keep moving her head back and forth because the mirror was badly scuffed and gave her only a piecemeal reflection of herself. She took a lot of trouble with her lipstick and when she was finished her eyes scouted anxiously from the smooth mask she had created. In the dull, stale room, she made a small moment of pathos that had no witness as she advanced on and receded from her careful image, mouthing and pouting, in the glass whose scruffiness was like an ironic prophecy, a mercury preaching. Her vanity, too desperate to be damning, contained its own punishment, being overshadowed by its own futility like fatalism. The importance she attached to every pore of her face was juvenile in its morbidity. To her, age was a personal and avoidable misfortune, like pimples. She beat back nature with a powder-puff. Against those inroads of age to which most people capitulate imperceptibly, and often casually, she fought a desperate rearguard action, simply because it was all that she had left to defend. No frontal defence was necessary. When she had married Peter, she had left behind not just a house and furniture and some people, but much that was less tangible and more significant. She had left behind almost everything that had been herself. Peter’s attraction to her had been physical and, in responding to it, she had fostered a spurious allegiance, one which was not natural to her life as she had known it and which, like a cuckoo, excluded all others, abiding none besides itself. Indulging her senses in an Indian summer, she had allowed herself to be carried away by an emotion that she couldn’t control and the motive power of which must soon die under her. All she could do was try to prolong it as long as possible. The pivot of her relationship with Peter was purely physical and, in the absence of much else, she could only maintain it. No matter where she might go, or how many things she might do, or how much she might have, she would always be forlorn and displaced, a very temporary person. All she had was the body she stood in, her physical desirability. She couldn’t face the thought of losing that. That was why for the past week or so the hope of something more had filled her with the sort of restless expectancy that is usually the monopoly of children. If Peter agreed, it could make her more than an errant body, give her a bulwark against the encroaching emptiness. If Peter agreed. She had broached it to him more than once already, showing him the idea from time to time, letting him become familiar with its strangeness before asking him to decide. He hadn’t seemed very agreeable. But tonight would tell.

  Back in the tea-room, she found that Peter still hadn’t arrived. She sat down to wait. She hoped that the football team had won, knowing the importance of accidental trivia to any plan. Her tea-cup had not been cleared away, and she tilted it mechanically in her hand, looking at the dregs like a spae-wife trying to foretell a surprise visit from which happiness will come.

  Like a happy omen, Peter came into the room, announcing his mood with a smile.

  Coming up to the table, he said, ‘Come on, Cleopatra. Tonight we eat the big dinner. Your barge is waiting.’

  ‘To what do we owe this?’ she said, laughing. ‘Did your team win?’

  ‘And that’s the least of it. A double up at Catterick, that’s worth a good fifty quid. And I just had it from Ritchie Evans there . . . You remember Ritchie? At Bert’s party the other week. The one that played the piano – a real case. I saw him at the football there. He has it on the bush telegraph that they’re polishing Carruthers’ shoes for me to step into. Seems just about a certainty. Ritchie’s never been wrong yet. I knew Carruthers had just about done the old hara-kiri with the hash he made of that last contract. But I didn’t know the funeral would be so soon. But that’s the way it goes. And I’m not complaining.’

  Her congratulations were drowned in his own talk and hustling activity as he conducted her out into the street. Her reaction didn’t matter too much, anyway. All he needed was her presence, like a dictaphone into which he could tell his urgent happiness, someone with whom to talk his feelings into shape. He was away ahead of her, making conjectural memos and dusting the seat of office, speaking to various people from his new status. Any contribution she could make to the enthusiasm he was generating was necessarily so indefinite as to be insignificant beside his own.

  ‘This is my night. Keep with me and I’ll give you some,’ he said, stepping aside to let people pass with a proprietary smile, as if he was leasing them the pavement.

  When they reached the car, he was still talking, throwing words about like baw siller. Driving, he showed none of the usual impatience that seemed to be set in motion with the engine. Normally, he was an extreme sufferer from driver’s disease, that jaundiced disillusion with humanity that afflicts those who observe the world through a windscreen. But tonight the car seemed to run on solicitude. He smiled at people overtaking him, he slowed down to wave cars out of side roads, he treated jay-walkers like amusingly mischievous children, and the horn was redundant. It was a lot more than Mrs Whitmore had hoped for. The omens were very favourable. She was tempted to put her suggestions to him there and then, in the intimacy of the car. But she decided against it. Better to wait and let his thoughts come to terms with one another before introducing a stranger to them. He was so taken up with himself at the moment that the mention of anything extraneous to his imminent promotion would be like an insult.

  ‘It’s nothing short of the “Royal” for us tonight,’ he had said, and that was where he took her.

  They had a long aperitif in the lounge bar before making an expansive entrance in the dining-room, a bowing waiter preceding them like a red carpet. Peter enjoyed ordering the meal and choosing the wine, a Beaujolais. All through the meal they talked about the promotion. It was a very happy and successful hour and a half, in which the food and the drink and the talk supplemented each other perfectly, words adding savour to meat and being washed down with wine. It was an inspired and sustained orchestration of enjoyment, the first movement of which ended when she came back to the simple repetition of how wonderful it was that he should get the job, a remark which had been the motif of the entire meal. But Peter brought that motif to an end when he said that they mustn’t be too presumptuous, because he hadn’t actually been given the job yet. Having infected her with his own enthusiasm, he was now schooling her in how it should be cured. That was the frame of mind he was in, a one-man-band of a mood in which he couldn’t help wanting to play all the parts. And he struck the chord that gave the evening its second movement with his next remark, spoken after he had finished the wine.

  ‘My God, Jane, you look wonderful tonight,’ he said, seeing her through three rose-tinted glasses.

  The opening theme of the second movement had had as prelude the warmth and stimulation of the meal and the wine, and had been hinted at in glances and moist li
ps and eyes that sent mute familiar signals of what was ahead. It did not have to be articulated. It was the more effective for not being articulated. But it continued and grew in certainty when they moved from the dining-room back into the lounge. They found a table in a quiet part of the room and, talking and sipping a few more drinks, they gradually brought the feeling in them to a higher pitch. It wasn’t so often now that their physical attraction for each other reached such a spontaneous mutual expression. At first it had frequently hit them with electric immediacy, stunning them into unconsciousness of what was going on around them in restaurant or living-room. Then everything else tended to be an unbearable obstruction between them and the consummation of what they felt. Now, with the adeptness with which every relationship leavens the flatness of its own custom, they savoured the interim, making it contribute positively to what lay beyond it. They did not attempt to hurry the evening towards its culmination. Rather they deliberately side-tracked themselves, seemed to lose sight altogether of the tacit tryst they had made between them, tantalizing their own desire. They detoured down comments on current news, dawdled in irrelevant discussions of their friends, disappeared behind short silences, leaving here and there small sensual clues, a long promissory look through an ineffectual veil of small-talk, laughter that was there before the cause for it, a languid stretching, the secret markings that only they understood. And all the time Mrs Whitmore was pleasantly biding her time, preparing her small, affectionate ambush.