Weekend (2 page)

‘It might be said that his beloved spouse found their splendid new dwelling less congenial than might have been anticipated.’ She was probably miserable, Andrew thought. ‘Yet even Croesus must have deemed it necessary to curtail the grandiosity of his ambitions.’ Muldoon ran out of money?

Andrew even began to enjoy Witherspoon’s evasive prose. It somehow suited Willowvale, the monument the monograph had been written essentially to celebrate. Like the building, the words were ornate beyond necessity. They baffled instant understanding of their purpose, as Willowvale did. Through careful rereadings, Andrew found himself engaged in an imaginative inhabiting of a darker life than the one being presented to him.

Witherspoon had a long and florid section near the beginning of his account where he suggested what had been the origins of Muldoon’s compulsion to build Willowvale. Many of his expressions reverberated in Andrew’s mind: ‘He was a visionary among the dark satanic mills’, ‘a place where truth might disport itself among congenial company’, ‘wealth metamorphosed into wisdom’, ‘a sea-girt Eden’, ‘a dwelling for his dreams’. Bringing the punctiliousness of an academic to such language, trying to sift fact from linguistic fabrication, Andrew worked out his own sense of the life of Edward Muldoon and what Willowvale was supposed to mean. Muldoon had been the son of a Scottish mill-owner whose crass love of money had offended his youthful sensitivities. After a failed attempt to be a painter, he had grudgingly accepted his destiny as a capitalist. Like many converts to a faith, he had become assiduous in the practice of it. Perhaps out of revenge, some thought, he
made his father’s success look like the work of a dilettante. One mill became many.

But Andrew was convinced that those who thought he was merely extending his father’s achievement were mistaken. The intensity of his new religion had an almost mystical dimension to it. Witherspoon had some basis for seeing him as a visionary. The more money he made, the more likely he was to be able to transubstantiate it into his vision, which was Willowvale.

‘So where is Willowvale?’ Jacqui said.

She saw Kate’s face become more animated, presumably because the question suggested serious interest and therefore the prospect of going.

‘On Cannamore,’ Kate said.

‘But that’s an island.’

‘They have things called ferries,’ Alison said.

‘I don’t like the sea. I get seasick easily.’

‘Maybe you should wait till they build an airport,’ Alison said.

Alison’s superciliousness was beginning to annoy Jacqui again. Because she had worked as personal assistant to a lawyer for a few years before coming to university, she had these moods when she seemed to treat younger people as if they were still in kindergarten. She was like someone who visits London for a weekend and decides she’s cosmopolitan and very, very grown-up. She even dressed for the part. For her, casual was formality with a button undone. She was being particularly condescending tonight.

‘What’s it all in aid of anyway?’ Jacqui said, brooding on Alison.

‘See it as part of the course,’ Kate said. ‘We have informal lectures. And discussion afterwards. Andrew Lawson’s doing one on
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
. David Cudlipp’s talking about
Farewell, Miss Julie Logan
. And Harry Beck’s supposed to be tying it all up in some way.’

‘I can hardly wait,’ Jacqui said. ‘I’m surprised there’s still free places.’

‘I wonder what Harry Beck’ll be talking about,’ Kate said, as if it were a matter of great fascination.

‘He’s probably wondering himself,’ Alison said.

‘What do you mean by that?’ Jacqui said.

‘I just think he looks like someone with a very dishevelled life,’ Alison said. ‘Sometimes when he comes into class, he looks as if he’s not sure what he’s doing there. It can take him ten minutes to focus on the work.’

‘You seem to focus on him quickly enough,’ Jacqui said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve seen you looking at him,’ Jacqui said.

‘I always do that when I want to see somebody.’

‘Staring? With your lips parted?’

‘I’m a mouth-breather.’

Jacqui couldn’t understand why Alison was being so offhand about Harry Beck. She had often said he was attractive. The sudden shift of attitude was annoying.

‘There’s something about him,’ Jacqui said. ‘I like the darkness in him.’

‘He’s really got a past him, hasn’t he?’ Kate said.

‘Doesn’t everybody?’ Alison said.

‘Something definitely happened to him,’ Kate said. ‘And he’s having to live with it.’

‘You’ve been reading
Wuthering Heights
again,’ Alison said.

‘I know what you mean,’ Jacqui said to Kate. ‘He was married, wasn’t he? But he doesn’t seem to have any children. Maybe he couldn’t have any. Maybe it’s that. Or maybe he loved somebody he could never get.’

‘There’s something troubled about him,’ Kate said.

‘It’s probably a bad back,’ Alison said. ‘Anyway, now’s your chance to find out.’

She looked at Jacqui. Jacqui wondered how she had come to be in the position of having an interest in Harry Beck. It was as if she was being deputised to stand in for Alison.

‘They have a free-for-all session on Saturday night,’ Alison said. ‘The students can do their own thing. Talks. Poetry. Anything goes. The barriers come down. It was great fun last year when I was there.’

‘So why aren’t you going again?’ Jacqui said.

‘I’ve got that history essay to write. It’ll take me all weekend.’

‘You just want the flat to yourself. With Kate and me away. Peace and quiet.’

‘I wish I could go.’

‘
You
can,’ Kate said to Jacqui.

‘I don’t know,’ Jacqui said. ‘I could’ve pulled Harry Beck here if I wanted to. Without going to the ends of the earth. Anyway, I’ve heard he’s so unreliable, you never know whether he’s going to turn up or not. Harry Beck?’

‘Harry Beck,’ she said, thoughtfully. ‘I’ve been under the covers with you a few times.’

The accent was American.

He recognised an innocent remark wearing garters. He had heard it before and he knew that she meant reading him in bed. He assumed she must mean the column since, as far as he knew, the books were out of print. Dan Galbraith had just introduced them to each other and now he fetched her the gin and tonic she had asked for and left them. As they spoke, he noticed that the man she had come to the party with seemed to have decided to start a drinking competition. He was apparently trying to see if he could drink himself under the table. He looked like succeeding.

He liked how she had met him on a level of immediate flirtation. That way the trivia could at least amplify into a pleasant game.

‘I hope I didn’t give you a false impression,’ he said. ‘I’m usually more animated in bed than my photo is.’

‘But your photo does look younger,’ she said.

‘I was a child prodigy,’ he said.

He couldn’t quite see how that remark related to what she had been saying but he managed to say it as if it were a witty rejoinder. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

‘I liked your last one. About the dogs,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’

‘But it wasn’t true about that dog you called Snarl, was it?’

‘I’m afraid so. Could make you give up on the species, couldn’t it? The human one, I mean.’

‘And I can’t believe what you said about Bruce.’

‘You’re speaking of the dog I used to love. I wouldn’t lie about Bruce. He would have skated any canine
Mastermind
.’

‘Do you like cats?’

‘Of course. We used to have hordes of them, too, when I was a kid. Not all at once, of course. But I’ve always been fond of cats. A bit like having somebody from MI5 billeted in the house. You never know what they’re up to. But I like that about them.’

‘We have a cat.’ The ‘we’ was ominous. Was she married to the peripatetic vat? ‘Maisie. She has the run of the house. Sometimes sleeps on my bed.’

‘My’ bed. Green shoots of hope showing again.

‘Oh, we’ll have to see about that,’ he said.

She looked at him, slightly startled.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, it could be dangerous. Maybe pass something on to you. All that proximity of fur.’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Also. Could maybe do some physical damage when you least expect it. Bite your bare bum or that.’

‘And why would your bum be bare?’

‘I honestly can’t think of a reason offhand. But I’m sure there must be one somewhere.’

They were smiling at each other when a man, walking as if he had a brass band behind him, came up and shook hands without preliminary, introduced himself and said, ‘I’m a lawyer.’ Harry just managed to stifle an impulse to say, ‘Ssh. If you don’t announce it, maybe nobody’ll guess.’ Instead, he introduced the lawyer to her, allowing her to supply her name, which he couldn’t immediately remember. Mary Sue. He was trying to resign himself with grace to a three-way conversation when he realised this was to be a monologue. The lawyer was here to put him right about something he had written in his column. The man was obviously one of those people who mistake fluency for
articulacy. As long as he kept talking, he assumed he was saying something of significance. He thought conversation was a one-way street. As Harry had dreaded, it was a street where she wasn’t going to loiter. She turned down her mouth at him and drifted away.

Time passes, like a three-legged tortoise sometimes.

‘What you don’t seem to appreciate,’ the man was saying, ‘is that those lawyers were simply fulfilling a public service by being there.’

He was trying to remember which column the man was going on about. It must be the one where he had attacked that legal firm which was picketing its local casualty units, distributing leaflets on how to claim for compensation if anything went wrong with your treatment.

‘I admit it’s possible that some few may be a trifle over-zealous,’ the man said.

‘Hm.’ (Excuse me while I go and throw myself off a cliff.)

‘But –’

He had lost track of her. That had been pleasant for a moment there, relaxed nonsense behind which their eyes had been reading each other like a sub-text. He had enjoyed her presence. He figured her about mid-thirties, maybe slightly over that. She had an attractiveness that made him not just wonder where she had been but wish a little he could have been there with her. Her body had reached the point of being opulently fleshed without yet being heavy. The soft blonde hair imbued her maturity with a warm glow. Given the almost anorexic fashionability of most of the younger women in the room, she had been like coming upon a Renoir in a gallery of Lowrys. Not that he didn’t like Lowry but he knew whose figures he would rather get physically involved with.

‘I don’t see why lawyers should be criticised for finding enterprising ways to ply their trade.’

His eyes were wandering round the room when he saw her. She was standing among a group of men. Well, she would be, wouldn’t she? But she was looking at him. The glance congealed into a stare. He didn’t know how long it took her eyes to turn away towards one of the men. Five seconds? Fifteen? But it had been as if they were looking at each other down a private, silent corridor. If that was just a glance, it was one your imagination could feed off for a month. It was a glance that felt like an assignation.

‘I say, good on them,’ the lawyer was saying.

Had he imagined it? She was talking with the men again. They weren’t a bad-looking group either. Especially two of the three. And they were young.

He hadn’t imagined it. To think that would just be giving himself an excuse for not trying to connect. She hadn’t come in with those men. The man she had come in with was looking as if the stomach pump might have to be summoned at any moment. He knew him as a friend of Dan Galbraith. Alec Something he was called. Maybe his connection with Mary Sue was casual.

He had to do something. He suspected that if he tiptoed away from the talking man, the absence might not be noticed. The man was so busy listening to himself, he didn’t need anybody else.

Maybe he had shut down his reception system automatically as a mode of self-protection, but he could no longer follow the lawyer’s monologue in detail. It had degenerated in his ears into a babble of soundbites in contemporary non-speak – stopping bucks and care in the community and final analyses and, bizarrely zooming in from outer space, the trial of Oscar Wilde.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘I’m just going over to the table here.’ (It’s either that or suicide.) ‘Maybe we’ll connect with each other later.’ (Say, if you’ve got a lasso.)

‘Hold on a minute,’ the man said, putting his hand on his arm. ‘I don’t think you’ve got my point at all.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you got mine. The main thing I was saying in the piece was that a democracy functions on consensus. Mutual goodwill. Take that away and it caves in on itself. If you’ve got one of our crucial institutions skulking round the premises of another for profit, and one that happens to be the most important one in our lives, you’ve got consensus disintegrating. Every dingo dog for himself. I admire the NHS. Apart from women’s emancipation, I think it’s the single most important piece of legislation we had in the twentieth century. You haven’t confronted any of that.’

‘No, no, no. Listen.’

‘I’ve listened. Two things. Take your hand off my arm. And – as Oscar Wilde probably didn’t say – piss off.’

He went over to the table which had been set up as an improvised bar. He was angry at himself for getting angry. This was Dan’s party. Once at the table, he loitered, waiting to calm down. He was also waiting for an amazing plan to arrive. All he could think of was that she drank gin and tonic. That was what Dan had given her. He made one carefully, turned and walked towards her group.

She noticed him as he came towards her. She smiled at him and was about to say something. Anything. Maybe ‘Hello again.’ But he took the almost empty glass she was nursing
and replaced it with a full one. He looked at her and turned and walked away. The men around her had gone silent. She took a tentative sip from the glass. It was gin and tonic. She was impressed that he had remembered. The voices started up around her again.