Weekend (10 page)

The coolbag contained two bottles of champagne. She had brought them as a way of celebrating.

The irony of it twisted her mouth into the death mask of a smile, one which extended to the bottle of sleeping pills, sitting squat and practical. She had persuaded her doctor to prescribe them more than six months ago, when she wondered if she would ever sleep again for a full night. She hadn’t taken one. She had brought the bottle with her this weekend because she had thought she might be too excited to sleep without them. They might still have their uses.

The glass had been rinsed and dried with the hand-towel in the bathroom. It sat shining and empty on the desk. Its innocent emptiness offered interesting possibilities. It could deaden the pain or end it, depending on how she decided to employ it. She would see. The Polaroid photo lay face down beside the pills. The black back of it was all she could bear to look at just now.

She arranged her five objects into a pattern that pleased her. Then she simply waited. She felt empty. Perhaps, she thought,
friendship and love and trust are the clearest mirrors in which we see a reflection of ourselves. Break them and we are left wondering if we exist. She felt hardly present in this room, barely physical. But mind remained – self-generating, the mad amoeba. Its endlessness frightened her.

In order to block out the image her mind was endlessly presenting to her, she had already crossed the room and locked the door that the strange woman in pyjamas had closed for her. She had taken off her coat and put it on the bed. She had lifted one of the glasses and replaced it in the bathroom, as if that were erasing the evidence of her folly.

But she knew none of this activity would work. The glass seemed more immediately present in the bathroom than it had been on the desk. In her head the door was always swinging open, ushering in the moment that had atomised her understanding of her own experience. It was a door she couldn’t effectively lock. Through it were still coming David and a woman she didn’t know, like an incessantly repeating scene in a bad film from which she couldn’t take her eyes.

Hyde seems obvious enough: the hidden asocial nature of a man who is socially thought to be known and much admired. But the name has other echoes, which trouble the clarity of this first impression. Hyde is also the name of a famous park in what was the most famous metropolis in the world. And a park can be seen as an obeisance to the country made by the town. A shrine to the natural in the heart of the man-made. That normalises him somewhat perhaps. Is he so alien to society after all? Is he so different from us? Another possible
meaning reverberates beyond this one. Hyde can also be a pun for the skin of an animal. So who is hiding? Him or us? What are we naming when we name him? We take names as defining a coherent identity. But his name melts into a confusion of meanings. May not our own?

The words gave Marion a brief shiver as she imagined the people she had vaguely assumed she knew, inhabiting all the dark and silent rooms around her. What were they doing? Perhaps just sleeping.

Harry Beck sat on the bed in black boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. He looked at the virginal white of the two pillows behind him. Only one would be rumpled in the dawn light. Maybe his next haircut should be a tonsure. Welcome to the monastery.

He caught a glimpse of someone and wondered for a second if he had come into the wrong room. But it was only the wardrobe mirror showing him a stranger. He was strange, all right. He recognised the hair – thick and not yet going grey. It was the same hair that had dripped playing football in the park and had gone to the disco with him and accommodated the long and the short of changing styles. But who was that underneath it? When had life switched faces on him?

Maybe the strange man in the mirror was telling him who
he was now, forbidding him to go on with the charade of pretending to be someone else. Maybe his sense of himself had stripped to its underwear as well. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

When Jacqui had come and sat down beside him in the lounge tonight, an old conditioned reflex had pre-empted any genuine reaction. He found himself smiling automatically and remembering the signals she had been giving him earlier. But, as she started to talk, he suddenly knew the role he was expected to play and felt that it wasn’t him. Without warning, even to himself, he was changing the script.

‘I really enjoyed your talk, Harry,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed yours the most.’

It was the first time she had used his Christian name to him.

Thanks.’

‘It was so true.’

‘I don’t know about that. It was only some thoughts.’

‘It was, though. Especially that stuff about us all being just animals. No matter how much we try to hide it.’

‘I don’t think that’s quite what I said, Jacqui. It’s certainly not what I meant to say. In fact, I think what I was trying to get at is that we can’t just be animals any more. And that we can’t quite effectively be anything else. We’re kind of deformed hybrids, I suppose. There’s a cheery thought. Let’s drink to it. Can I buy you one?’

‘No, thanks. This animal is going upstairs. To sleep alone.’

She smiled. He smiled.

‘My room-mate has deserted me.’

‘I’m sure it’s not a matter of personal hygiene.’

He had meant to deflect the offer with suave levity. Once he had said it, he felt it had all the suavity of a kick in the crotch.
Were there good turn-off lines as well as good turn-on ones? She didn’t seem bothered.

‘I could easily prove to you it’s not.’

He looked at his glass.

‘What’s your room number?’

He glanced up at her. She was watching him steadily. He didn’t know what to say.

‘I never give it out, Jacqui,’ he said.

It was news to him.

‘Come on,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You can’t be that old.’

‘Maybe not. But I’m trying to be.’

Into the awkward silence, as if somebody had turned up the volume, came an awareness of laughter and loud voices. He felt bad for her, as if he might have made her feel the laughter was directed at her.

‘Jacqui,’ he said.

‘See you,’ she said and rose and moved away.

He had noticed that she didn’t go upstairs. A few minutes later he had seen her talking to Mickey Deans and then to David Cudlipp.

He lay back on the bed. His behaviour towards Jacqui couldn’t have come out of nowhere. He was trying to work out what had brought about his reconversion to being fully human, instead of a sexual urge with identikit man attached.

He had spent the time since he came here doubling back in his mind. Willowvale had become where Mary Sue was, inside his head whether he wanted it or not.

He had been trying, he suspected, to rediscover in himself enough stature to accommodate the feeling he had for Mary Sue. He had been trying to make himself worthy of her. It was
embarrassing but it was true. Shades of courtly love. Perhaps that also explained the torture he had put himself through to try to make good his bad treatment of Mickey Deans.

He swung his feet on to the floor and sat up. He looked at the man in the wardrobe mirror and thought it was time to try to get to know him better. How could Jacqui Forsyth have imagined he was open to her proposition? He had never considered being with a student in his life. Maybe he had become so estranged from himself that people thought he was someone else.

He was ready to make acquaintance with himself again. He thought affectionately of Mary Sue turning at the bottom of the stairs to give him the letters. He decided it was time to read the letter from the publisher.

The layers of implication in the name Hyde contain inherent natural contradictions. The first meaning, with its undertones of hypocrisy and presenting a sham image of who you are, carries pejorative weight. Read from this viewpoint, the text can be taken as a critique of individual social duplicity. But the second meaning, punning with the name of a park, compromises the first one. For the second meaning acknowledges by implication the acceptance of the natural, the comparatively wild, as an inevitable part of the socially constructed, the man-made. In a somewhat domesticated form, it is true. But it does to some extent normalise both Mr Hyde and Dr Jekyll. The first meaning would have distanced us from them, as criticism of another tends to do. The second meaning puts a bridge between them and us. Hyde
becomes not merely a part of Dr Jekyll but a part of ourselves. Read from this viewpoint, the text becomes a less comfortable examination of our own inner lives set against our attempts to conform to the supposed norms of social behaviour – the instinctive self that is housed in the social person, the park within the city. The third meaning casts us further adrift from any fixed or predetermined point of view and challenges further the initial implication of one-sided criticism. The hide of an animal is its most blatant characteristic, the means by which it shows itself most fully. So Hyde is paradoxically not hiding. Dr Jekyll is. The text can be seen as being not merely a condemnation of the evil of Mr Hyde but of the evil of the society that would deny the truth of him utterly while exploiting it, exemplified by Dr Jekyll.

The need to use the toilet woke him, as it always did these nights. Two trips a night as a zombie was his average. Noticing his travelling alarm glowing beside him to his left in the dark, he found that he was lying on the wrong side of the bed. He wondered vaguely how that had happened. Then he remembered why he was on this side of the bed.

As he groped his way upright, trying not to disturb her, he was glad he had insisted on an en-suite room for all lecturers. Female students would have one, too. Only male students would have to go on safari to the nearest toilet on their floor if they felt the need during the night. It was a way to keep the cost of the trips within budget. No one had ever complained about gender discrimination – no doubt, he suspected,
because they would simply use the wash-basin that was in every room which wasn’t en-suite.

When he switched on the bathroom light, he was startled to see that he was naked. He slept in pyjamas. It was like being embarrassed by what he didn’t want to see. The grey and heavy looseness of his body confronted him with a familiar dismay.

He held his penis over the bowl and waited for the urine to arrive. When it did eventually come, it fell sheer into the water of the lavatory pan in heavy droplets. It occurred to him again that those contests of projectile peeing he had witnessed as a boy (who can pee the highest?) hadn’t been as pointlessly silly as he had thought they were at the time. They had been an instinctive expression of growing virility. Young men can pee like stallions. Old men can’t. He wiped his penis with a small piece of toilet paper to avoid the dreaded residue, and flushed. It was then that he was aware of the heaviness of his penis, as if it were trying to tell him something (I’m not just here for this, you know).

He crossed to the wash-basin and turned the hot water on quietly. He painstakingly tried to coax some lather out of an oblong of soap so small he found it difficult to locate it in his large cupped hands. He was taking his time, less out of commitment to hygiene than as a way to let him adjust to the strangeness of where he was. He dried his hands and peered into the bedroom, into which the open bathroom door threw a shaft of light that diffused gently through the rest of the room.

She was still asleep, he was glad to see. He needed to be alone to work out what he felt. Looking at her, he couldn’t believe that someone so attractive was lying in his bed. He tiptoed through and put on his underpants, trying to draw in
his stomach as he pulled them up. She seemed fathoms down in sleep. Maybe the wine had helped with that. He looked for the bottle and saw that it was still half full. Not half empty. Was her presence teaching him optimism? He found his drained glass and refilled it. He sat down on the cushioned chair, took a sip of warm white wine and stared at her.

He still couldn’t understand the sequence of events that had led to her being here. It was like spinning random numbers on a safe to which you had lost the combination long ago and suddenly it sprang open, and you couldn’t believe the forgotten wealth that was inside. He contemplated her as if she had been conjured out of some half-forgotten poem, say ‘The Eve of St Agnes’.

If a careless mistake could yield such riches, maybe he should have cultivated more carelessness in his life. The half-bottle of whisky he had brought with him had been an ill-advised attempt to ration his consumption. When he had gone to his room on Friday night he had decided to celebrate completing his main responsibility, having delivered the only lecture he had. The celebration had got slightly out of hand. Shortly after midnight, the half-bottle was empty. He excused himself by remembering that he had taken a couple of drinks from it before dinner.

He had thought of going to bed but decided he really needed one last nightcap. Perhaps the bar was still open. When he stepped out of his room into the corridor, the omens weren’t good. Nobody was celebrating Mardi Gras tonight. He walked through a silent hotel, meeting no one. Before he reached the bar downstairs, he noticed a dim light in the lounge. Glancing in, he saw Mickey Deans and Kate Foster sitting under a single light, talking with quiet intensity. The tableau they made went through him with such a pang of the
unattainable, they might as well have been in the Garden of Eden. He turned away without making a sound.

The dark silence of the bar had already told him it was closed but he went in anyway. He was wondering if they had shuttered it. Some of these country hotels didn’t. It was no good. Fort Knox with a gantry. He went to the end of the bar to see if he could get in that way. Everything was locked up. He wandered back across the bar and stood against the wall just inside the doorway, reluctant to accept the hopelessness of things. He had a vague idea that, if he could just reach one of the optics, he could fill a glass and pay in the morning. He was being silly, he knew, but his silliness was suddenly rewarded in an unforeseeable way.