The Crow Road (35 page)

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Authors: Iain Banks

BOOK: The Crow Road
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‘It’s not definite yet,’ Rory shrugged. ‘And it’s ...’ he frowned at his brother. ‘Shit, Ken; it’s just more hack-work. It’s better paid, is all.’
‘What is it though?’
‘Oh, a fucking travel programme, what else?’ Rory rolled his eyes. ‘But anyway; we’ll see, okay? It’s not definite, like I say, and I don’t want to get anybody’s hopes up, so keep it quiet; but things might start to happen.’
‘But that’s
great
news, man,’ Kenneth said, sitting back.
‘Talking about me, I hope, boys,’ Janice said, returning with their drinks on a tray.
‘... said, “My
God,
Rory, I’ve never seen one that big!” and I said - oh; hello dear,’ Rory grinned, pretending only then to notice Janice.
She sat down, smiling. ‘Talking about the size of your overdraft, are we, dear?’
‘Gosh-darn,’ Rory said, snapping his fingers, looking at Kenneth. ‘Caught telling tales again.’
‘Runs in the family,’ Kenneth said, taking up his glass. ‘Cheers, Janice.
’
‘Your health.’
‘Slange.’
 
 
 
They left after that drink and went back to the house at Lochgair; Rory and Kenneth cleared a tangled choke of bushes and shrubs at the rear of the garden, where Mary wanted the lawn extended. They sweated through the insect-loud afternoon, while the sun shone. Janice sunbathed, and later helped Mary and Margot prepare the evening meal.
Janice had taken that day off from the library. She and Rory left on the last train back to Glasgow that night.
It was the last time Kenneth ever saw Rory.
 
 
 
Fiona sat in the passenger seat of the car, watching the red roadside reflectors drift out of the night towards her. She was thrown against one side of the seat as Fergus powered the Aston round the right-hander that took the road out of the forest, down, into and through the little village of Furnace. She was pressed back against the seat as
Fergus accelerated again. They swung out and past some small, slower car, over-taking it as though it was stationary; headlights ahead of them glared, the on-coming car flashed its lights and she heard its horn sound as they passed, a few seconds later. The sound was quickly lost in the snarl of the Aston’s engine.
‘If you’re driving like this to try and prove something, don’t bother on my account,’ she said.
Fergus was silent for a while, then, in a very controlled and even voice said, ‘Don’t worry. Look, I just want to get home as soon as possible. All right?’
‘Everything’ll suddenly get better once we’re home, will it?’ Fiona said. ‘Kiss the kids on the head and get Mrs S to make some tea; stiff whisky for you, G and T for me. Maybe we should call up the McKeans to say we got back safely; you can ask after Julie ...’
‘For Christ’s sake, Fiona -’
‘ “For Christ’s sake, Fiona“,’ Fiona sneered, imitating Fergus’s voice. ‘Is that all you can say? You’ve had half an hour to think up another excuse, and -’
‘I don’t need,’ Fergus sighed, ‘any excuses. Look; I thought we had agreed to just leave this — ’
‘Yes, that would suit you fine, wouldn’t it, Ferg? That’s your way of dealing with everything, isn’t it? Pretend it hasn’t happened, maybe it’ll go away. If we’re all terribly polite and decorous and discreet, maybe the whole horrid thing will just ...’ She made a little fluttering motion with her hands, and in a high-pitched, girlish voice, said, ‘Disappear!’
She looked at him; his broad, soft-jowled face looked hard and set in the dim light shining from the car’s instruments. ‘Well,’ she told him, leaning over as far as she could towards him. ‘They won’t just go away, Ferg.’ She tried to make him look at her. He frowned, put his head slightly to one side and lifted it, trying to look round and over her head. ‘Nothing ever goes away, Fergus,’ she told him. ‘Nothing ever doesn’t matter.’ She strained over a little more.
‘Fergus
-’ she said.
He pushed her away with his left hand, back into her seat.
She sat there, mouth open. He seemed to understand the silence and glanced over, a weak smile flickering on his face. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Getting in the way a bit there. Sorry.’
‘Don’t you push me!’ she said, slapping his shoulder. She hit him again. ‘Don’t you ever dare push me again!’
‘Oh stop it, Fiona,’ he said, more exasperated than angry. ‘One minute I’m in the dog-house because ... well, because I’m not all over you all the time; next second -’
‘ “Not all over you all the time”?’ Fiona said. ‘You mean not fucking me, Fergus, is that what you mean?’
‘Fiona, please -’
‘Oh.’ Fiona slapped one palm off her forehead, then crossed her arms, looked away, out of the dark side window. ‘Fuck; did I swear? Oh fuck. Oh what a silly fucking cow I must fucking be.’
‘Fiona -’
‘I said something straight. I’m so sorry. I actually said what I meant, used the sort of word you’d normally only hear from your golfing chums or your rugby pals. Or does Julie use that sort of language? Does she? Do you like her to talk dirty? Does that get you going, Ferg?’
‘Fiona, I’m getting rather tired of this,’ Fergus said through his teeth, his fingers gripping the wheel harder, rubbing round it. ‘I’m sorry you think what you do about Julie. As I have tried to tell you, she was the wife of an old friend and I’ve kept in touch since she got divorced -’
‘Still stuck on that, Fergus?’ Fiona said, impersonating concern.
‘Oh dear; we had that line back at Arrochar, I seem to recall. And what was the rest of it? Oh yes, one of her sons has leukaemia, poor little kid, hasn’t he? And you’ve helped her and the little darling with BUPA out of the goodness of your heart -’
‘Yes I have, and I’m sorry you choose to sneer about it, Fiona.’
‘Sneer!’ laughed Fiona. ‘It’s a joke, Fergus. Jesus, she was practically taking your zip down.’
‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous. It’s not my fault Julie got a bit tipsy.’
‘She was smashed out of her brains, Fergus, and about the only thing she remembered was that she wanted to get your trousers off. God knows why, but she seemed to associate that with pleasure.’ Fiona gave a sort of strangled laugh, then put one hand up suddenly to her nose, and looked away, and sobbed once.
Fergus drove quickly on, trees flicking past like green ghosts to the right, the waters of the loch just a dark absence on the left.
Fiona sniffed. ‘Trying the great silence again, eh, Ferg?’ She pulled a handkerchief from her handbag on her lap, dabbed at her nose. ‘Still pretending it’ll all go away. Still sticking your head in your precious fucking optical-quality sand.’
‘Look, can’t we talk about this in the morning? I mean, when you’re ...’
‘Sober, Fergus?’ she said, looking over at him. ‘That what you were going to say? Blaming it on drink again? Is that all it was? Of course, silly me. I should have realised. Dear Julie gets drunk and for some bizarre reason suddenly starts feeling you up under the table while we’re nibbling our cheese and biscuits, and making pathetic double-entendres, and attacks you outside the bathroom; totally unprovoked, of course, and it’s all just the drink talking. And I’m just being hysterical, I suppose, because I’ve had too many of John’s terribly strong G and Ts and it’ll all look different in the morning and I’ll come to you and say sorry and wasn’t I being a silly girl last night, and you can pat me on the head and say yes, wasn’t I? And we can still go for cocktails at the Frasers’ and bridge at the McAlpines and tee off with the Gordons and cruise with the Hamiltons with a united front, a respectable face, can’t we, Fergus?’
‘Fiona,’ Fergus said, face set and teeth clenched. ‘I don’t know,’ he breathed, ‘why you’re making such a big thing of this. It’s just one of those things that happens at parties; people do get drunk and they do do things they wouldn’t normally think of. Maybe Julie has ... or has had, in the past, a crush on me or something. I don’t know. Maybe -’
‘A crush on you,’ said Fiona. ‘Jesus. Well, that’s a better try, Ferg. But I don’t think you’re quite as good a liar as you think you are. And she’s not that good an actress.’ Fiona looked down, twisting the handkerchief in her fingers. ‘Oh God, Ferg, it was so fucking obvious. I mean. I knew there was something going on; all those trips away, and getting drunk and not being able to come home, staying at one of your chums’ delightful little pied-à-terres. Oh, sorry, no, you can’t phone back, he’s only just got it and it hasn’t had a phone put in yet. Or coming back with bruises; how you suddenly became so very clumsy or so easily marked. But at least I could still kid myself, at least I didn’t have my nose rubbed in it.’
‘Fiona!’ Fergus shouted, knuckles white on the steering wheel. ‘For God’s sake, there’s nothing to have your nose rubbed in! Julie’s just a friend. I haven’t touched her!’
‘You didn’t have to, she was touching you,’ Fiona said, voice quiet, looking away from Fergus, out to the darkness of the loch. A few weak lights shone on the far side, and headlights on the Otter Ferry road, two miles away across the black expanse of waves, swung out briefly, like a lighthouse beam ... and then dimmed and disappeared. The car roared through another small village before the trees hid the view again.
Fiona kept her face away from him, looking out into the night, watching the vertical bright line of light the car threw onto the serried mass of dark conifers. Even there she could not escape him; she could see his distorted image in the slanted glass of the car’s windows, dim in the background, still lit by his instruments.
She wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved him, and why she had stayed with him for so long after she’d realised that if she ever had, she did not love him now.
Of course she could say it was for the children, as people always did ... It was true, up to a point. How terrible it was to have those easy phrases, trotted out so often in the course of gossip, or heart-to-hearts, or in magazine articles, or even court cases, become so real.
It was never the sort of thing you thought about when you were young, when you were - or thought you were — in love, and all the future shone with promise.
Problems belonged to other people. You might imagine supporting them, talking with them when they needed to talk, trying to help, but you didn’t imagine that you would be the one desperate to talk (or the one too embarrassed to talk, too ashamed or too proud to talk); you didn’t imagine you would be the one who needed help, not even when you told friends that of course there might be problems, or agreed with your beloved that you would always talk about things ...
Staying together for the children.
And for the adults, she thought. For the sake of appearances. God, she had thought she was above that sort of thing, once. She had been bright and free and determined and she had decided she was going to make her own way in the world, just as well as any of her brothers might. She’d been a sort of feminist before it became fashionable; never had much time for all that sisterly stuff, but she was positive she was as good as any man and she’d prove it ... And marrying Ferg had seemed like an extra boost to her life-plan. London had been exciting, but she had not shone out there, she felt, the way she had here. She had never felt any affection for the place and had made no friends there she would miss; and anyway, she would find fields to conquer up here, coming home triumphant to wed the lord of the manor.
But it had not been as she had imagined. She had expected to be the centre of things in Gallanach, but the McHoans as a family had so many other things happening to them; she had felt peripheral. The Urvills’ own history, too, made her feel like something unimportant on the family tree, for all that Fergus talked of responsibility and duty and one’s debt to the next generation.
She was a leaf, expendable. A twig - maybe - at best.
Somehow all her dreams had disappeared. It seemed to her now that all she had ever had had been the dream of having dreams; the
goal of having goals one day, once she had made her mind up what it was she wanted.
But that had never happened. First Fergus, then the twins, then her own small part in the society of the town and the people there, and in the wider, still circumferential concerns of this wee country’s middle-to-ruling classes, and in the more dissipated commonwealth of mildly powerful people who were their peers beyond that - in England, on the continent, from the States and elsewhere - took up her time, sapped her will and replaced her own concerns with theirs.
So now, she thought, I am married to a man whose touch disgusts me, and who anyway does not seem to want to touch me. She looked at Fergus’s dim reflection, distorted in the glass, then tried to re-focus on her own image. Can he find me as repellent as I find him? I can’t look that bad, can I? A few grey hairs, but you don’t notice them; still a size twelve, and I’ve looked after myself. I look good in this, your standard little black number, and I still get into a tight pair of jeans ... What’s wrong with me? What did I do? Why does he have to spend half his time with that drunken, brassy bitch?
God, the best time I’ve had in the past five years was one night with Lachy Watt, angry at Ferg, and more surprised than anything else. They way he just took my hair in one hand, while we were standing looking up at that God-awful window in the great hall, and turned my head to him, and pulled me close; tongue down my throat before I knew what was happening, and there was something adolescent and desperate beneath all that working-class directness, but Jesus, I felt
wanted ...
She shook her head. That was best left out of it. Once was once; dismissible. Ever again would set a pattern. Lachy had been back one time afterwards that she knew of, a year later, and he had called, but she’d told him she wouldn’t be able to see him, and put the phone down on him. No, that didn’t matter.

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