by Louise Welsh
‘If we hadn’t been interrupted?’
‘What does it matter?’ She leant forward and kissed him gently on the lips. ‘We had fun. We like each other. Let’s keep it that way.’
His voice was steady. He’d read about well-integrated autistics, they had to think about every gesture, smile, make eye contact. He formed his mouth into a grin.
‘You’re right. It was fun while it lasted.’
Rachel touched his arm.
Don’t flinch, don’t argue, don’t push her away.
‘It’ll be a great book. You’re always saying how underrated Lunan is. This is your big chance to put him on the map.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I know so. Fergus does too.’
The pair of them discussing him. Where? Over dinner? In bed? Did he ever feature in the little bit of ciné film she ran behind her eyes while Fergus fucked her?
He said, ‘Rachel, Fergus can’t stand me.’
She took her coat from the hook on the back of his office door.
‘Don’t be so paranoid, Murray. You know Fergus. If he didn’t think you were a valuable member of the department, you wouldn’t be enjoying a year’s sabbatical, you’d be looking for a new post.’
Murray stood at his office window. It was still wild outside. The wind caught at Rachel’s hair, blowing it across her face. She struggled for a moment with the car door, then she was in, headlamps on, reversed out and away, her only backward glance at the road behind though the rear-view mirror. It was the last time. He wondered if it was the peeping Tom or his own invitation to go for a drink that had pushed Rachel away. Maybe she had always intended to it end like this. Murray stood at the window, watching the trees fingering the sky the same way they would if he weren’t there. On his way out he stopped by the gatehouse and handed the almost-full bottle of malt to the porter, who received it with grateful, bland surprise.
Chapter Six
THE REASONS MURRAY WATSON usually avoided Fowlers were clustered around their customary corner table, looking like a eugenicist’s nightmare. The pub wasn’t busy, but it was warming up with the overspill of office workers and students from more popular establishments so he was halfway to the bar before he spotted Vic Costello, Lyle Joff and Phyllida McWilliams and remembered that this was where they congregated late on Friday afternoons, playing at being the Algonquin club and staving off the wretchedness of the weekend.
Maybe the need to suffer that misery so often brings in its wake would have led him into their company anyway, or maybe he would have settled for a lone pint and a nod in their direction, but then he felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Rab Purvis’s face, shiny with sweat and bonhomie.
‘I’ll get this, Moira.’ It was typical of Rab to be on first-name terms with the manageress; typical too of him to add Murray’s drink to the round and a tip on top of the price. Mrs Noon nodded her thanks and Rab gave Murray’s elbow a squeeze that told him his friend was at least three pints to the good. ‘Come away into the body of the kirk.’
It had drifted beyond the time where even late diners could pretend to be having a pre-prandial and the department’s dwindling stock of alcoholics welcomed Murray with hearty relief. He was the fresh blood, the bringer of new topics, the excuse to get another round in and postpone the moment when the pub door swung home and they each stepped out alone.
‘Hello, stranger.’ Phyllida McWilliams’s voice had lost its usual edge and now held the full throaty promise of a pack of unfiltered Camels. She leaned over and gave Murray a kiss. ‘Why do we never see you?’
Murray didn’t bother to mention that she’d passed him in the corridor three days ago, her head bowed, looking like Miss Marple’s hungover younger sister.
‘You know how it is, Phyllida. I’m a busy little bee.’
Phyllida picked a blonde hair from Murray’s lapel and raised her eyebrows.
‘He’s a B, all right,’ said Vic Costello. ‘Leave him alone, Phyl, you don’t know where he’s been.’
The woman let the hair fall from her fingers onto the barroom floor. She nodded. ‘Many a true word.’
‘He flits from flower to flower.’
Rab conducted a little minuet in the air with his hand.
Phyllida laughed her barmaid’s laugh and started to recite,
‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly …’
It was worse than he’d thought. They must have been there for hours. Murray wondered if they suspected about Rachel. He should go home, make himself something to eat, think things through.
Lyle Joff began an anecdote about a conference he’d attended in Toronto. Phyllida clamped an interested expression onto her face and Vic Costello rolled the beer around in his glass, staring sadly into space. Over by the bar Mrs Noon turned up the music and Willie Nelson cranked into ‘Whisky River’. Vic Costello placed his hand on top of Phyllida McWilliams’s and she let him keep it there for a moment before drawing hers away. Murray wondered if Vic’s divorce was finalised and if he had moved out of the family home yet, or if he was still camping in the space that had once been his study.
Phyllida leaned against Murray and asked, ‘Seriously, where have you been?’
She took his hand in hers and started to stroke his fingers.
‘Around.’ Murray tried to return her flirt, but he could see Vic Costello’s slumped features on Phyllida’s other side and, despite the rips in its fabric, the banquette they were sharing was reminiscent enough of a bed to invite unwelcome thoughts of ménage à trois. ‘I was at the National Library today, working though what’s left of Archie’s papers.’
‘Oh.’ Phyllida’s fascination was a thin veneer over boredom. ‘Find any fabulous new poems?’
‘No, but I did find notes for a sci-fi novel.’
‘Poor Murray, out to restore and revive, and all you get is half-boiled genre fiction.’
Murray laughed with her, though the barb hurt. He took out his notebook and flipped it open at the pages where he’d copied down the contents of Archie’s jotter.
‘I found this, a catalogue of names.’
Phyllida glanced at the scribbled page.
‘Obviously trying to work out what to call his characters, and doing rather badly, poor sod.’
Murray wondered why he hadn’t realised it earlier. The disappointment sounded in his voice.
‘You think so?’
She gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Shit, I thought it might have been something.’
He snapped his notebook shut.
Murray’s curse seemed to wake Vic Costello from his trance. He necked the last three inches of his beer.
‘It’s my shout.’
‘Not for me, thanks.’ Lyle Joff raised his glass to his lips and the last of his heavy slid smoothly down. ‘It’s past my curfew.’ He gave Murray a complicit look. ‘Bedtime-story duty. Winnie the Pooh – a marvellous antidote to a hard day at the coalface.’
As preposterous as the image of chubby Joff at a coalface was, it seemed more feasible than the picture of him sitting at the bedside of freshly washed, pyjama-clad toddlers reading about a bear of little brain. Murray had been introduced to Joff’s wife at a faculty party once; she was prettier than he’d expected. He wondered how they’d met and why Joff was so often in the early-evening company of people for whom the only alternative to the pub was the empty flat, the armchair tortured with cigarette burns and the book collection that was only so much comfort.
Vic Costello looked at his watch.
‘It’s gone half-nine. They’ll be safe in the land of Nod by now surely, long past breathing in your boozy breath, Lyle.’
Lyle Joff looked at his own watch as if astonished to see that the hands had moved round. He hesitated, then looked at his glass as if equally amazed to find it empty.
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br /> ‘You’ll get me shot, Costello.’ He grinned. ‘Just one more for the road then.’
Vic raised his empty glass in the air until he caught the attention of Mrs Noon. He held five fingers up and the manageress gave a curt dip of her head to show she’d oblige, but only for the moment.
Phyllida leaned over and whispered, ‘You’re a cunt, Vic. You won’t be happy until that boy’s marriage has gone the same way as yours and you’ve got a full-time drinking companion.’
‘Why would I need that when I’ve got you, Phyl?’
Costello gave her a hug. Phyllida pushed him away.
‘You forget yourself sometimes.’
Drink took the sting from the scold, but there was a seed of bitterness in her voice that would blossom with more watering, and when Vic Costello tried for a second squeeze her shove was impatient.
The tray of drinks arrived and Lyle Joff helped himself to a fresh pint. He took a sip and wiped the foam from his top lip.
‘There’s nothing wrong with my marriage.’
‘I’m sure it’s rock solid.’ Rab patted Lyle’s arm and asked Murray, ‘Have you met Lyle’s wife? A beautiful girl, classical profile, a touch of the Venus de Milo about her.’
He winked and Murray wearily took his cue.
‘Armless?’
‘Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
Phyllida laughed and Lyle said, ‘Built on strong foundations. Love, affection, shared values.’
He looked into the middle distance as if trying to recall other reasons his marriage would endure.
‘Children,’ Phyllida said. ‘Children are a blessing.’ Vic Costello excused himself to go to the gents.
Keeping his voice uncharacteristically low, Rab turned to face Murray, cutting the pair of them off from the rest of the company.
‘I’m glad you dropped by.’ The phrase sounded oldfashioned, as if Murray had accepted an invitation to afternoon tea. ‘I owe you an apology, for coming on too strong when I saw you last. Just because I’m not getting any doesn’t give me a right to become one of the moral majority.’ Rab’s face set into a stern inquisitiveness, eyebrows raised almost to the ridges of his brow. It was only acting. The look he gave nervous students to encourage them to speak up. He held out his hand. ‘Shake?’
Murray had let slip about Rachel a month into the affair. The two men had eaten dinner with a visiting speaker then gone for a drink on their own to discuss the lecture free of its author. Maybe it was the combination of wine and beer or maybe it was the rose-tinted evening. Maybe he was boasting or maybe, just for that instant, Murray had thought his friend might be able to help. Whatever it was, as they’d left the pub, skirting the exiled smokers loitering on the pavement outside and stepping into the gloaming of a pink sunset, Murray had found himself saying, ‘I’m having a bit of a thing with Rachel Houghton.’
Rab Purvis had been more forthright than a casual listener might expect a professor of chivalric romance to be.
‘She’s a ballbreaker. I wouldn’t touch her with a bargepole.’
Murray had glanced at his friend’s tubby abdomen and tried to imagine Rachel propositioning Rab as she had him, shutting the door of his office on sports afternoon Wednesday, pushing the essays he’d been trawling through to one side, sitting on the edge of his desk, so close he’d wondered, then guiding his hand under her sweater so that the quality of his wonder had shifted and magnified.
‘It wasn’t a bargepole that I was thinking of.’
‘Any kind of pole. Leave well alone, if you know what’s good for you.’
‘What if it’s my one last chance of true love?’
‘Then run for the hills. Rachel Houghton isn’t looking for love, Murray. She’s happy with Fergus. She simply likes spicing things up by screwing around.’
‘And what’s wrong with that?’
‘Nothing, if shagging your head of department’s wife doesn’t bother you.’
‘Why should it?’
‘Would you like me to give you a list?’
‘Not really.’
But his friend had gone on to recite a long, frequently crude but eminently sensible catalogue of reasons why Murray Watson should steer clear of Rachel Houghton. It hadn’t made one iota of difference. The affair remained acknowledged but unmentioned again, until now.
Murray took Rab’s proffered hand and shook it.
‘She just dumped me.’
‘Ah.’ Rab sucked another inch off his pint. ‘In that case I take back my apology. You’re better off out of it. You know what the department’s like. A busy little hive with bees swarming all over each other and Fergus at the centre, gobbling up the golden globules of honey we lay at his feet.’
‘Pollen.’
‘What?’
‘Pollen. The bees bring the queen pollen and she makes it into honey.’
‘Pollen, honey – it’s all the same.’ Rab abandoned the analogy. ‘The place is a poisonous rumour mill. Look,’ his voice took on the fatherly tone that indicated advice was about to be proffered. ‘It’s not easy working where we do. Bad as being a diabetic in a candy shop, all those delectable sweet things passing through your hands every day and you not even allowed the tiniest little lick.’ He laughed. ‘That was slightly filthier than I intended.’
‘It’s okay, I get your drift.’
‘You don’t have to tell me how frustrating it can be. When I started it was different but …’ Rab drifted off for a moment to the happy land where lecturers and students were still compatible. ‘But times change.’ He sighed, staring into the middle distance. ‘I was having a nice drink until you came in looking like Banquo’s ghost and reminded me how everything has gone to shit. You had a good time and now it’s over, just thank whatever ancient gods it is you worship that you didn’t get caught.’
‘We did. Someone saw us.’
‘Ah,’ Rab sighed. ‘I suppose that would put a different complexion on things.’ He took another sip of his pint. ‘Come on then, don’t leave me in suspense. Who?’
‘I don’t know. Someone. A porter maybe. I had my back to them.’
‘Spare me the gory details,’ Rab grunted. ‘I hope to God it wasn’t a porter. They’ll tell the cleaners, who’ll let slip to the women in the canteen, and once it gets to them you’re lost. Might as well take out a full-page ad in the Glasgow Herald, except there’d be no need.’ He shook his head. ‘If you don’t know who it was, you can’t be sure there’s a problem.’
‘They didn’t see us standing too close in the coffee lounge or exchanging notes in the quads, they saw me rogering her on the desk of my office.’
‘Rogering?’
‘“Making the beast with two backs”, “putting the horns on old Fergus”, or whatever you Romantics call it.’
‘Shagging.’
‘What do you think I should do?’
‘What can you do?’ Rab patted his arm. ‘Get a round in.’
Fowlers had quenched thirsts for at least a hundred years.
Its high ceiling was iced with intricate cornicing, its windows frosted with etchings advertising whiskies and beers, which let light filter into the bar, but allowed privacy from passersby to priests, poets, skivers, fathers on errands or men seeing about dogs, idle students and lovers budgeting towards leaving their spouses. Mrs Noon kept things tight and it was rare to wait too long to be served or to see a fight that got beyond the third punch. Fowlers should have been a nice place for a drink, but it was a dump, a prime contender for a brewery theme-pub revamp. There were no ashtrays on the table, but the ceiling retained its nicotine hue and the smell of unwashed old men, stale beer and the cheap bleach used to sluice down the toilets was no longer masked by cigarette smoke. The bar stools, which harboured men who remembered the city when it was all soot and horseshit, were as scuffed and unsteady on their pins as their occupants. The patterned orange and blue carpet, once loud enough to drown out the Saturday night crowd, had sunk to sludge. Murray tipped back his fifth pint of t
he evening and decided this was where he belonged.
Phyllida McWilliams and Vic Costello had left an hour or so ago, taking their quarrel to one of the West End restaurants where they were known and dreaded. Phyllida had had trouble getting her arm into the sleeve of her jacket and Murray had guided her hand into the armhole while Vic strode to the door with the single-minded purpose of the practised inebriate.
‘You’re a lovely man, Murray. Take my advice.’ She gathered her bags of shopping; ingredients for another Friday night dinner she was destined not to cook. ‘Never get involved with someone who isn’t available.’
‘What made you say that, Phyllida?’
She shrugged and gave him a silly grin. ‘I have been drinking, you know.’
Now there were three of them left. Lyle Joff, quieter after his phone call, Rab and Murray. They were still at the corner table, but in the hours they had sat there the pub had transformed from a peaceful place where men could swap confidences into a red-faced rammy. The bar was threedeep, the staff quick-pouring wine and pressing more glasses to optics than they had earlier in the evening, but it was still pints that ruled; a shining spectrum of gold, yellows, browns and liquorice black. Not that anyone stopped to admire their drink. People were knocking them back faster than it was possible to serve and from time to time a barmaid would squeeze into the throng and return with a tall column of tumblers, as if gathering ammunition for a siege.
Two thoughts were pinballing around Murray’s brain. The first was his need for another drink, the magic one that would make everything click into place. The second was that he’d drunk too much and should get home before he shipwrecked himself.
Maybe it was the bell that made him think of shipwrecks. It was loud and clanging and spoke to him of treacherous rocks and shattered hulks. What was it like to drown?
‘Pushing the boat out tonight?’
That’s what they were doing, setting out into perilous waters, and none of them in possession of their sea legs. Murray raised his head. Mrs Noon was holding a tin tray loaded with empty tumblers, their rims edged with tides of dead froth. He wasn’t sure he’d ever seen the woman out from behind the bar before.