Weekend (12 page)

She remembered coming up the staircase. She had still felt good. She had a secret to tell. After wandering several corridors and hearing occasional strange voices in rooms she passed, she found twelve and tried the door. It was unlocked. She opened the door into a moonlit room placid with anonymous furniture. She put on the light and closed the door.

The bed was perfectly made (obviously not by David) except for the indentation of someone who had sat there. She imagined him working on his lecture, doing that thing he
did of going over his notes again and again. The key to the room was on the bedside table. He was such a careless man outside his work. He must have gone out without thinking to lock the room. There was a bottle of red wine sitting beside the key. It was untouched. Maybe he was saving it for when he came back in. He wouldn’t need a corkscrew. It had a screw-off top. That was so unlike him; he liked to pride himself on the wine he bought. French only, that was what he liked to say. He must have had a problem getting what he wanted and settled for anything liquid. She smiled. At least he would be having something better now. Krug. It was his preferred champagne.

She set down her bag and laid on the desk the coolbag and the packet of sandwiches she had bought on the ferry. She took off her coat and threw it on the bed. She went through to the bathroom and checked that there were two glasses. She washed and dried them. She brought the glasses through and set them beside each other on the desk. She collected the shirt, underpants and socks he had dropped on the floor. She found his travelling-bag inside the wardrobe and put the used clothes in it. She paused, wondering if she should go down and wait for him. But she wanted that there should be just the two of them when she told him and she wanted no intervening small-talk to postpone what she had to say.

She sat down. As she gazed out to sea, rehearsing her news, she heard voices outside. The late ramblers had returned. She took out the photograph and set it face down on the desk. She waited, smiling to herself. Voices infiltrated the corridor and gradually receded. Nobody came. She waited. She rose and stood in the middle of the room, wondering if she had better go down to look for him.

It was then the door clicked suddenly and swung open.

‘Behave yourself, woman,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll get the wine.’

He was turned away from Sandra, his right hand round the edge of the door. His head was bent towards a dark woman with wild hair. Her face was raised to kiss him. When she had kissed him, her face turned towards the room. Her shock was silent. It formed her mouth into a perfect circle. Perhaps it was the sight of that which made his head turn quickly to see what the woman was seeing.

‘It’s you?’ he said, looking upwards pointlessly, perhaps just noticing that the light was on.

Time stopped, became a tableau that she seemed to be able to study at leisure. His hair was dishevelled. His pupils dilated into a confession. The woman’s face looked naked of makeup. Her lips were bloated with kissing. As her mouth closed, her eyes became hard and assessing, as if measuring an opponent. The proof was incontrovertible. These were people who had been making love. She knew it instantaneously and undeniably.

‘This is my wife,’ he said, to the room it seemed.

For seconds there didn’t appear to be any more he could think of to say. It sounded as if he wasn’t sure who it was he was talking to, whether to the woman or himself. Perhaps he had just remembered he
had
a wife. His statement loitered awkwardly in the air, like someone in evening dress who has turned up at a funeral. Someone who doesn’t know what to say. But the woman did.

‘Oops,’ she said.

It was that sound which released the surging anger in Sandra. She had no idea where it came from. It possessed her in a primal way, a power in her she hadn’t known existed, something molten shifting underground. She was screaming.

Now she couldn’t remember much that she had said. It
seemed to her to have been hysteria in a foreign language, most of it swearwords she couldn’t remember using before. Something in her must have stored them and now the repression of years gave them a terrible force. They geysered from her mouth.

She could remember screaming, ‘Ex-wife, you bastard!’ and the rest was malignant gibberish to her now. He started to say something but she drowned him out. While she ranted, she took his travelling-bag from the wardrobe and flung it at him, a shirt spilling out as the bag hit him in the chest. While he scrabbled to collect the shirt and stuff it back in, she became angrier. Was his only reaction to what he had done to make sure he retrieved all his shirts? ‘Oops, you fucking whore,’ she screeched at the woman. ‘I’ll give you oops.’

Her rage had blow-torched them into the corridor. He made a feeble gesture with his left hand, indicating that she should tamp down the noise. ‘Here,’ she shouted. ‘Take this with you, you fuck!’ She ran and collected the bottle of wine from the bedside table and made a missile of it. (Why had she done that, she wondered. To remove every trace of him from the place?) He fumbled it in mid-air but didn’t drop it. At least some things were important to him.

‘I’ll speak to you when you’ve calmed down,’ he said feebly.

‘Phone me in ten fucking years then,’ she bellowed. ‘Get out, get out, get out, get out! And never come back. Bastard!’

They moved swiftly out of her vision. She put on her coat and buttoned it. She lifted her bag and put it back down. She went through to the bathroom, put his toiletries in the toilet-bag and left it against the wall outside the door. She put out
the lights, as if preparing to leave, and her sense of what she might do went out with them. She became very still. She sat down at the desk and was suddenly aware of the wreckage of her life.

The image of him and the woman standing in the doorway subverted every memory she had of their marriage. Past moments that had confirmed the reassuring routine of their time together were now shadowed with strange possibilities. She could only imagine what might be hiding in the shadows.

His preference for working late at his office in the university rather than at home (because, he said, it was where the books he might need to refer to were) seemed sinister now. Casual remarks he had made at dinner parties with friends began to sound ambiguous. Phone-calls he had taken separated from the name he had put on them and whispered around her like conspirators. Her past was a code of lies she must try to decipher.

He woke up with the impact of his rejection hanging over him in a darkness nacreous with moonlight, as if inscribed there in letters of fire. The writing on the wall. He was sorry he hadn’t gone on sleeping.

He wished briefly that he hadn’t opened the letter tonight. (At least he had managed to put it off for two days.) Then he felt this was a pathetic wish. Whether you wore a blindfold or not, the firing squad still got you.

He applied thought like a painful tourniquet to a bleeding wound: anyway, this was just another failure. He had had plenty. This was their time to visit. All you had to do was wait and out of the blackness would float the shapes of failure. They were never far away, the night whisperers. They kept their distance until they could get you on your own, conspirators who plotted endlessly to persuade you that you were not who you might have been.

He hated to waken at this time in the morning, when every foothill of a problem seemed insurmountable and there gathered round you in the gloom the orphans of ambition and the casualties of error. Their familiarity was no comfort. He thought again of Maggi and wished her well, hoping his wishes didn’t bring a blight with them. The arrogance of his ambitions to be a writer had been a lodger she couldn’t live
with either. How long could promise last before it turned into a contradiction of itself? He thought of his mother dying. He thought of a woman he had betrayed at twenty-two. Old, apparently imperishable accusations by himself against himself filed past like mourners looking for a funeral.

But a stranger jostled in among them. He waited to recognise the newcomer. The new self-dismay didn’t lie in rejection by a publisher. (Critics, he had long ago decided, are people who begin by telling you you never had it and end by telling you you’ve lost it.) It lay in the effect rejection had had on him. He felt as if the letter was a punishment for the way he had spoken to Mickey Deans about his story. Embarrassment flooded him. The scene still sat in his mind, landscape of the moment when malice came out of his mouth like venom on the tongue of a snake.

The sun had been a disc of mildewed pewter in the sky. The breeze was soft. They were sitting on adjoining rocks above a mildly restless sea that shifted lazily like cooling lead that never cools. It could have been a low-rent idyll – a pleasant shoreline scene in mild weather, the veteran and the novitiate. He was holding Mickey Deans’s very short story in his hand, three sheets of careful typing double-spaced. The paper riffled in the small wind.

Mickey Deans was waiting. His face seemed to be trying on reactions, changing expressions in readiness to meet what he was going to say. He hadn’t known himself. He had read the story several times, but as if through his fingers. The truth was he couldn’t see it clearly because it was blocked by his own feelings. Maybe he had more than writer’s block. Maybe he had reader’s block.

Every time he read it, he was reading that he hadn’t written a word he could believe in for months. He saw the absence of
himself. It was not a pleasant sight. He resented the piece of paper he was holding in his hand, the effortless self-confidence it expressed. It negated him.

Mickey Deans was waiting. He looked so young. The whites of his eyes seemed as if no lines of red could ever come there. The irises were as blue as Mary Sue’s. The black hair was ridiculously abundant. Nobody had the right to look as young as that.

He couldn’t remember exactly what he said, perhaps because he wasn’t really talking about the story, just busking his own disillusionment with the story as the instrument. But he said a lot of technically negative things. His attack on the story was an oblique way of defending himself.

Even as the words came out of his mouth, he was disgusted by them. He was stunned into inarticulacy by his own aimless malice, which was unretractable between them. He watched the face of Mickey Deans helplessly as it absorbed his words. The eyes widened in surprise, seemed to lose perspective, hardened slowly into focus on his own eyes.

He was reminded ridiculously of a moment in an old Danny Kaye film. It must have been Boris Karloff, he thought, who was portraying a madman explaining to Danny Kaye how to commit the perfect murder. An icicle inserted in the brain, Boris was saying in his best thespian manner, will melt before rigor mortis sets in, thus leaving no trace of a weapon. No trace here, Boris, he thought, but a small kind of death surely.

He was looking for words to try to modify what he had said. It wasn’t easy. As he opened his mouth, hoping some sort of magic ointment might come out, Mickey Deans leaned across and said something and took the paper gently from his hand and stood up and walked away. As he watched the receding figure, he felt as dead as the stone he sat on. It was
only then he made sense of the words Mickey Deans had said and was still left wondering what meaning they were hiding.

‘I suppose that covers it. Thanks for taking the time to read it, though.’

(‘What I actually meant,’ Mickey Deans said to Kate Foster, ‘was: you fucking wanker! When did you last have the guts to write anything? Except fucking newspaper columns. Still, he came back from the dead a bit, didn’t he? I suppose it took balls to do what he did.’)

What he did afterwards was at least a penance, he thought, as he lay in his bed. It was a feeble one. Mickey had come to his lecture in the afternoon but only, he suspected, to ask the most awkward question he could think of. He left as soon as Harry had tried to answer it. Kate Foster left with him. Mickey hadn’t looked satisfied. He wasn’t there for the evening meal. He wasn’t even there for the traditional Saturday evening Free-for-all session, when students could make any contribution they wanted to the jollity of the evening, with Andrew Lawson acting as MC. While Calum Smith, the boy who had read everything, offered an appreciation of Bob Dylan, with musical illustrations, and Naim Choudhry gave what was meant to be a humorous talk called ‘How to Pass English Without Reading a Book’, Harry still couldn’t find Mickey Deans.

He made a decision. It was a dubious one, which he hadn’t the right to make. He slipped out of the lounge and went upstairs to his room. He was glad he had asked Jean in the office to photocopy Mickey’s story in case he lost it. He had some trouble locating it. He had put it at the bottom of his bag, perhaps to avoid noticing it when he didn’t want to, which was liable to be anytime.

He smoothed out the three sheets. He checked that the story was all there and went downstairs. When he came back into the lounge, Apollonia, the beautiful Greek student, was reading some of her poetry to a hushed audience. He found it strangely ethereal stuff, involving things like an imaginative flight over the roofs of a city and an emotional epiphany in a greasy-spoon café. He could see why the audience was hushed, though. She was perched on the table at the front, bare-footed, wearing very tight jeans and a short top, which the protuberance of her breasts made even shorter. Her brown, flat midriff wasn’t difficult to look at. Her delivery was very animated. She moved a lot and her right hand kept flicking away some fronds from a forest of blue-black hair. Take away the words, she would still have been a riveting mime. She was the real poem. When she finished, he suspected that many of them were applauding the wonders of nature.