Weekend (14 page)

In his falsity to both he had lost his sense of himself. He could see no habitable life now. He felt he had been sleepwalking in a play, taking cues from other people, and had
wakened in the last act to find he didn’t know the words any more and didn’t believe in the part he had been playing. But there was no other.

He remembered a phrase Witherspoon had used when he was writing about the death of Edward Muldoon: ‘the peacocks mourning on the lawn’. There were no peacocks now but he imagined he could hear them. In his mind they were mourning more than Muldoon.

He rose quietly and moved to the window. He gently pushed aside one of the curtains. Had Muldoon stood here in some dark times? Had he stood at a window and looked out at what he had achieved? If he had seen it in this half-light, it must have looked more like a cemetery than a garden. The other Carnegie. Had he been as disillusioned at the end as Carnegie had been? He sought solace for himself in thinking of Muldoon.

Witherspoon’s device for circumventing what looked like the sad details of a private life and giving it an aura of public significance was obviously that comparison with Carnegie. Incorporating the name of Carnegie into the title must have been meant as a way of generating interest and implying importance by association. But there was some validity in seeing Muldoon’s career as providing a local imitation of Carnegie’s global one.

The parallels Witherspoon suggested between the two held for much of the way. Each man had built an impressive Scottish mansion by the sea. Each wanted to turn his money into social progress. Each ended with a sense of failure that was catastrophically defined by the First World War. Each created a private place that would end as a resort for the paying public. The attempt of each to go beyond the making of money became after death merely another way of making money.

He pushed the curtain further aside softly, as if a fuller view of the grounds would give him a better sense of the scope of Muldoon’s failure.

The difference was only one of degree, not of kind.

Carnegie’s Skibo at Dornoch was much grander than Muldoon’s Willowvale here on Cannamore. Carnegie’s impact on the world was huge, Muldoon’s more or less nonexistent. Carnegie’s reaction to the First World War was that of someone with massive international influence. Imagine being a man who could, with some justification, feel personally insulted by the outbreak of a world war. Muldoon’s reaction was a small, personal bitterness. His son, Edward, had been killed in the first year of the war at the age of nineteen. It was many years after Carnegie’s death that Skibo became an expensive bolt-hole for the enormously wealthy. It wasn’t long after Muldoon died in 1916 that Willowvale became a rest home for soldiers and then a sanatorium and finally a hotel, which went rapidly downmarket.

A shape suddenly appeared from the trees at the other side of the lawn and hobgoblined through the darkness in the direction of the hotel.

Welcome, he thought. I hope you enjoyed your night. He wondered who it was.

But didn’t Muldoon’s failure have more human resonance than Carnegie’s success? What Carnegie had achieved had not finally matched the scope of his ambitions but it was still tangibly there, in countless libraries and scholarships and the Peace Palace at The Hague. Against the awesome extent to which his aims had been fulfilled, it was difficult to sustain any compassion for Carnegie’s sense of disappointment. His vision survived his death. It had become a complex of institutions that impinged daily on the lives of many people.
The well-known story of his life told us nothing about ourselves except that we would never be like him. His impact on the world was too diffuse, too vast to be related to personally. It shut us out.

Muldoon’s only lasting achievement was Willowvale and it survived in part as a negation of what he had meant it to be. It was a failure so human that anybody could take a holiday in it. The largely unknown story of his life had ended in something that accommodated the ordinariness of our own lives. In spite of its intended grandeur, it had become just a casual part of some people’s experience.

That was what defined its elaborate ordinariness. What this place had become demonstrated what it had failed to be, daily mocked what Muldoon had seen it as being. Witherspoon had listed at one point numerous dignitaries who had visited Willowvale. They were mayors of here and MPs of there, businessmen and knights. The names were obviously intended to leave the reader awestruck.

Reading them, he had found it poignant that he had never heard of a single name. Their fame appeared to have lived as long as the local editions of the newspapers which had recorded it. Perhaps he was being unfair but, considering the sonorous emptiness of those names and the pomposity of Witherspoon, the only one of which he had any substantive evidence, he felt relieved that he hadn’t been present at any of those august gatherings. He wondered if Muldoon had sat among his guests, puzzled that they could be as boring in the special setting he had made for them as they were anywhere else.

Nothing much seemed to have happened as a result of their well-fed and well-watered stays at Willowvale. No great theories for the betterment of society were recorded. Some
charitable enterprises were referred to in the monograph but the implication was that these were no longer extant at the time of writing. For some years before Muldoon’s death, Witherspoon’s discretion hinted, Willowvale didn’t resound with the chatter of many voices.

Standing at this window, he felt a kinship with Muldoon. Maybe what this place had been meant to be was a kind of humanist church, a place built to express a belief in big abstractions like progress and social conscience and the perfectibility of people. And just as real churches were being turned into discos and bars, it was natural that this place had become a hotel. Humanism as well as Christianity had fallen on hard times. What were supposed to be the monuments that housed the meaning of the future had become temporary accommodation for the pleasures of the present, nothing more. He had himself reduced Willowvale to that this weekend. He had defined the hollowness of his own pretensions here.

Through this window he saw his life as an elaborate pretence. Even his university career had been an exercise in self-delusion. He had always thought its purpose was to help people to grow into fully realised individuals. That involved academic rigour. Sometimes that rigour calcified into preciousness. He still remembered some lectures on Anglo-Saxon sound changes which he had attended as a student. He had found their irrelevance hilarious, like something out of Beachcomber (Dr Strabismus of Utrecht, whom God preserve). But at least that academic seriousness made demands on students. Now he felt universities were adjusting their degrees to fit the students, like bespoke tailoring.

It was right that universities should open up their formerly closed borders to the shifting attitudes and the dominant issues of the society in which they found themselves. But he
would have thought the point of doing that was to submit our society’s sense of itself to stringent examination, not simply to rubber-stamp its validity.

He remembered reading in the papers about Michael Jackson’s visit to the Oxford Union. It made depressing reading, a performance of vapid sentimentality. There was nothing you could disagree with, unless you were a devout believer in cruelty to children. But then he didn’t say much of any substance at all. He struck a series of compassionate poses and everybody took him at face value. In his case that was an interesting thing to do since, whatever his face was, it wasn’t his own. And then, of course, he cried.

Yet all was mindless adulation. On television the faces of the students emerging from the hall glowed like candles at a Barry Manilow concert.

He knew Thatcherism had begun the process of obliging universities to sell themselves in the marketplace. But did that mean one of the oldest universities in the world should offer itself as a venue for unexamined cultural pap? Maybe, he thought, we can look forward to Bologna bidding for the Eurovision Song Contest and Salamanca hosting Miss World. Michael Jackson’s tears? He would rather have Anglo-Saxon sound changes.

What had sustained him for so long was a fantasy. The realisation might come to him as a grief but the truth was that it expressed itself externally largely in terms of farce. Truth was always double-edged. It all depended on the angle from which you saw it. Even the tears that had dried on his face had led to nothing but snot. He closed the curtains and turned and felt for a handkerchief in his trousers, which were over one of the chairs, and blew his nose as delicately as he could, not to waken Vikki. Life undercut our dreams even as it encouraged them in us.

When she stayed with him on Friday night, they had simply slept together. Did this mean at that stage his infidelity had been less? The question was academic now. Maybe everything in his life had been academic. Tonight they had made love. At least that was what he hoped it had felt like to her. He had been surprised that his sexual urge remained alive. The experience had been awesome for him, like glimpsing the shore of a lost continent of feeling. But he wasn’t exactly expert in judging how far the feeling might have been shared by Vikki. She had been very tender towards him afterwards. But he had already learned her kindness was such that her reaction could have been a conscious attempt to reassure him.

He gave up trying to understand. He gave up trying to understand anything. He put the handkerchief away, a small parcel of waste matter, which measured his sense of his own life at the moment. He suspected that what he had been confronting was not some sudden revelation but a truth which had been integral to his entire life. It was simply that some honest hours of contemplation in a hotel room, away from the affirming furniture of his life, had erased the dubious self-delusions with which he had overwritten that truth. He thought now, trying to give himself some bleak comfort, that such a bitter truth was what underlay all our lives, and our hopes were just a palimpsest that covered it temporarily and faded with our breath. Maybe each generation just wrote their own palimpsest of hallucinated hope, and that was living. If so, it was somebody else’s turn. He was too tired not to face the truth.

His career, his education, his aspirations left him shivering in the cold. The feeling that took him back to bed was a sense of primal nakedness. He needed to borrow the heat of someone else’s being to feel alive. He crawled into bed and put an arm round Vikki’s warmth. She accepted him and automatically
took his hand and cupped it round her left breast. He breathed deliberately quietly, not to interrupt her sleep. He did not know her eyes had opened and were staring into the darkness.

So what I am suggesting to you is that
Farewell, Miss Julie Logan
could be read as a kind of converse to
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. Dr Lawson talked yesterday about the almost total repression of Mr Utterson’s nature. Well, J. M. Barrie’s book could be seen as Utterson’s story. It could be subtitled
Peter Pan: The Inside Story
or
Something Buried in the Kailyard
. It is like the autobiography of Barrie in code, a subversive account of his own career.

There wasn’t much of David Cudlipp’s lecture Marion wanted to make notes on, she had decided. It wasn’t just that she didn’t like the coldness of his voice. It was the feeling he gave her that everything was pre-decided. He wasn’t inviting you to discover something for yourself. He was telling you that he had decided for you. Besides, she wanted to start on Harry Beck’s talk about the Oedipus myth before they had to leave, and the subtle change of light in the room was telling her dawn was coming.

What is buried, of course, is the reality of the main protagonist’s experience. The minister, Adam Yestreen, can come to no terms with his spontaneous, darker self but to wage war on it. His perpetual response to his animal nature is to deny it utterly. But he can’t suppress it successfully. It remains as a fifth-column which constantly subverts his sense of himself. He gives the blacksmith his fiddle but its music remains seductive to him. He denies the existence of ghosts but creates his own. He falls in love with a woman no one else can see. And then he denies that he experienced her presence. He dies as a stranger to himself because he refuses to engage with the feelings in him he doesn’t agree with. The man he is dies in a prison of who he thinks he should be without ever experiencing natural freedom. It is a story of empty and heroic folly. His life is a pathetically successful denial of his life. If Henry Jekyll can be seen as a terrifying warning against acknowledging the animal within us, Adam Yestreen can be seen as a perhaps more terrifying warning against denying it.

She was in the kitchen. It was her favourite room in the flat, large and comfortable. It was where she felt they could be most pleasantly together outside the bedroom. She was sitting at the long, rough wooden table. A cup of coffee had gone cold at her elbow as she read a book. Which one was it? She thought it might have been
Breathing Lessons
.

Outside the high window the evening was making a sunset. When they bought the place, the estate agent had recited the customary unconvincing list of the house’s attractions. In it he had omitted what had become for her one of its quiet joys, a
recurring pleasure. From time to time the kitchen window delivered spectacular sunsets to the room. David had joked with her that, when they came to sell, they should insist on including in the prospectus that Turner was commissioned to do the sky every so often. As she sat reading, the clouds had already turned into limitless embers.

David suddenly appeared in the kitchen, holding some sheets of paper in his hand. She thought he must have been pleased with something he had been writing in the small room he used as a study, for he was brandishing the sheets in a proprietary way and smiling at her. His hand hit the switch and the electric light banished the sun from the surfaces of the furniture.