Weekend (21 page)

What is the Sphinx? For the Greeks it has the body of an animal, the wings of a bird. Out of that body grow the torso and face of a human. It is, as I’ve suggested, a kind of composite of the animal world, a composite of which we are an integral part. We are harmoniously combined in it with the other animals. But notice that the part by which we are represented includes the head, where the mind is. The part which enables us to unravel the riddle.

Marion turned off the tape to make some coffee. As she moved about the kitchen, she suddenly felt the strangeness of what she was doing. Combining Harry Beck’s news from what he thought was the darkest place with having a coffee. I suppose we
are
a strange species, she thought.

‘There is surely intelligence among the young,’ Democritus was saying, ‘and lack of intelligence among the old. For it is not time that teaches good sense but timely upbringing and nature.’ And ‘The desire for more destroys what is present.’
‘Poverty and wealth are names for lack and satiety; so one who lacks is not wealthy and one who does not lack is not poor.’ ‘A life without feasts is a long road without inns.’ ‘A man of sound judgment is not grieved by what he does not possess but rejoices in what he does possess.’ ‘Learn to feel shame before yourself rather than before others.’

He replaced the book on the shelf, where it merged with the lines of others, another brick in the walls of words around him. He had instinctively come here, to his office in the university, rather than go directly home. He felt guilty about extending Mhairi’s time for looking after Catriona but he had felt the need to locate a sense of himself again, to work out who it was who would be entering his own house.

The words hadn’t helped. It wasn’t that he didn’t feel their relevance. He still experienced that quiet thrill he had often felt when reading an old text. Here was a man writing two and a half thousand years ago and telling him about himself. The weekend had been for him an unexpected inn on a long road. He was certainly learning to feel shame before himself rather than before others.

But, instead of confirming him to himself as they had so often done, the books in this small room seemed to call him in question now. What had been his psychological bunker for so many years, the place where he had stored the essential purpose of his life, was breached by an alien presence. The alien presence was himself, the man he had been with Vikki. The sense of new potential he had discovered with her, of unexplored space in himself, made the place where he had felt most securely at home feel suddenly and pointlessly narrow. He understood as he looked round the room how safety could be dangerous. It could stultify. A refuge could just be a fancy name for a prison. Like Dr Manette, so conditioned to
confinement that he couldn’t bring himself to pass through the open door of his cell in the Bastille, he was afraid of the possibilities that seemed to be before him. To pursue them would be a negation of what his life had meant for so long. But their very existence was a contradiction, in any case, of who he thought he had been.

‘The desire for more destroys what is present.’

That had already happened. He couldn’t return to his life with Catriona as the man who had left it two days ago. He had subverted the meaning of their time together. He came back to their relationship as someone who had already undermined it. The treachery seemed all the greater because he couldn’t meaningfully confess it to her.

The sense of a self-deluding life extended to this room. He looked around it. The motes drifting in two shafts of grey sunlight gave it a sombre, tomb-like atmosphere – and around him the serried experience of the past, bearing names. It was as if they had thought the meanings they had found were of permanent significance. So had he. But were they?

In the quiet gloom he noticed the screen of the computer he had never learned to use effectively. It glinted at him like a malevolent eye, as if it knew his time was up and its time was only beginning.

He thought about having visited a school last year to talk to some sixth-form pupils about coming to university. He had met with them in the school library and had been aware, as they talked, of the computers there were around them in the room, like an electronic assault party in the citadel of Gutenberg. The computers might be few in number but their presence seemed to him to dominate the room, silent spies who already had so much authority here that they constrained the students’ responses to him. He was listened to politely but
he learned sadly that only one girl acknowledged reading as a habitual activity. The rest admitted that it was something they hardly had any time for.

The sadness he felt wasn’t mitigated by his understanding of some of the reasons for it. It had occurred to him that the virtual monopoly the book used to enjoy as a pastime to engage the mind had broken up into several alternatives. The nineteenth-century appetite for novels the size of a small outhouse was there because they were mainly what the imagination had to eat. The culture now was a smorgasbord of passive options. The book had to take its chances.

He also knew, from being aware of his own pattern of recent behaviour, that most of us tend to spend our leisure on the softer options. Television, for example, was something he could often watch without having to engage the brain. Late at night he could sit in its warm glow as if it were a sauna. Sometimes he might object to its pointlessness but he was liable to go on watching in spite of himself, muttering things like ‘How did this tripe get to be on the box in the first place?’ and ‘I don’t believe this,’ as if the remote control weren’t resting on the arm of the chair. The tendency could be compounded by the fact that ease itself is habit-forming, so that we may not only settle for the easier medium but progressively for the less taxing forms of that medium, as if suffering from a mild degenerative condition.

The book makes heavier demands on us, he thought, looking round. A scene in its pages doesn’t appear ready-made before our eyes, so that all we have to do is lazily record it. We have to construct it in our imaginations. It is a much more participatory medium, more our own creation. It’s a DIY experience, he thought. The practice of it empowers us
with a sense of ourselves by demanding our own individual interpretation be earned in decodifying it.

Luddism was pointless. He stared across at the computer he didn’t like and saw it as a sign of an irreversible change in the way we conceive our lives. But he couldn’t simply put his faith in it. He thought of the politely baffled confrontation he had experienced in that school library, a kind of cultural Mexican stand-off. There was more than age dividing him from those students. He suspected they saw him as if he had stepped out of a time-machine, apparelled in quaint attitudes. He knew that he saw them as dangerously self-assured, dismissive of the very medium which had not only been central to the evolution of their society but which could have deepened their awareness of who they were in it.

Yet he had to admit that they were far more in tune with the times than he was. There was surely intelligence among the young, even if it seemed to him to be intelligence in the sense of information rather than creative thought. It was a kind of intelligence that made them travel much lighter than he had ever done. Taboos for them seemed to relate to things like wearing the wrong style of clothes and enjoying the wrong kind of pop music. Sex was demystified. He sometimes wondered if the id had gone public. These days it was often photographed and liked to appear on television.

It came to him that the pupils in the library and his own younger students at Willowvale would have found it bizarre to be agonising over a weekend with a strange woman. The pleasure he had found with Vikki made him wonder if they might be right. Maybe what you thought were the deepest feelings of your heart were no more than adopting the fashion of the times. Had all his well-known moral objections to what
he regarded as the shallowness of the present been no more than the jealousy of a generation that missed the party?

But he still had to honour those objections, even when they related to himself. Especially when they related to himself. He would take his guilt home with him and try to make the only kind of expiation he could, in caring for Catriona. It was all he could do.

He lifted the phone and dialled his own number. When the connection was made, he heard only silence.

‘Mhairi?’ he said.

‘Andrew? Oh, Andrew. Catriona. Catriona has—’

The suddenness of her tears drenched him in knowing. The feeling in his gut, like being disembowelled, knew how to complete the sentence she hadn’t been able to speak. The feeling also knew that, for his unexpiable guilt, it was a sentence for life.

‘These piles are killing me,’ Dan Galbraith said, shifting in his chair.

‘You still bothered with them?’

‘Bothered? On a bad day I’ve got an arse like a baboon.’

‘Thanks for sharing that with us,’ Sylvia said, bringing in three glasses and laying them on the table that had a map of the world under its glass top.

‘Sorry, Syl. That wasn’t meant for your ears, obviously. Just a bit of locker-room badinage.’

Dan was wrestling with the cork of a bottle which was misted with chill.

‘But there’s an operation for it, isn’t there?’

‘Harry,’ Sylvia said. ‘Puh-lease. Do not mention the operation. Peter. Dan’s brother. Had the “operation”. I’ve heard about it so much, I sometimes think it was me that had it. He talks about it the way some people used to talk about the war. Only the operation was worse, it seems.’

Dan popped the cork and poured the wine. Sylvia lifted two glasses, gave one to Harry and sat down with the other.

‘Anyway, to matters less mundane,’ she said. ‘How—’

‘Mundane?’ Dan said. ‘Having purgatory in your underpants? That’s mundane?’

‘The weekend. How was it for you?’

‘I’m still not sure,’ Harry said.

‘Oh, here,’ Dan said. ‘I’ve got another wee word-test for you.’

Harry smiled, knowing the sort of thing that was coming. Perhaps because he worked as a sub-editor on the newspaper, Dan almost made a hobby of trying to find examples that illustrated the importance of nuance in language.

‘I like this one,’ Dan said. ‘What happened was that I was watching an old black-and-white film. I can’t even remember the name of it now. But that actor was in it. Is it Mary McCarthy’s brother? Kevin? The one who was in
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
. Anyway, there’s a scene where a mother is annoyed with her son and she makes a threat. A couple of minutes later I was trying to remember what she said. And there was one word I couldn’t get. And it struck me how dialogue can convey almost subliminal information. And I worked out this wee scenario.’

‘I hope it’s not
Gone with the Wind
,’ Sylvia said.

‘Right. A film relating to the forties is being shot. A woman is supposed to be threatening to chastise her eight-year-old son. He’s given to telling lies. She’s fed up with his fantasies. She says, “If this doesn’t stop, I’m going to have to take the
hairbrush to you.” The writer interrupts, ruining the scene. He tells her she’s got the line wrong. When he explains what the line should be, the crew are annoyed. They think he’s wasted their time for no good reason and he’s costing the production money. The writer won’t budge. He says the line she said has quite different implications from the one he wrote. He makes them do it again with the mother saying, “If this doesn’t stop, I’m going to have to take a hairbrush to you.” Was the writer justified? If so, why? If not, why not?’

‘Leave it with us,’ Sylvia said. ‘The weekend. What do you mean you’re not sure, Harry?’

‘Just that. It was a kind of strange weekend. I don’t know.’

‘Mystery,’ Sylvia said. ‘I love it. So?’

Pausing before he spoke, he thought at first that he resented Sylvia’s inquisitiveness but then he realised that this was why he had come here, to give his feelings to his friends for clarification. He had known that Sylvia would be brusquely direct with him. He had come here on impulse after getting off the bus in Glasgow. This was why, he now understood.

‘That woman at the party on Thursday,’ he said. ‘You know her well?’

‘What woman?’ Dan said.

Sylvia looked at Dan.

‘What’s your problem?’ she said. ‘Senile decay? Are you sure that was just your fiftieth we were celebrating? They went out as if they were surgically joined. The woman who came with Alec. What’s her name?’

‘Mary Sue,’ he said.

Sylvia nodded.

‘That’s right. She’s American.’

‘Poor old Alec,’ Dan said. ‘He couldn’t bite his nails by the time he left. He needed instructions to get through the door.’

‘They’re not seriously connected, are they?’

‘Harry.’ Sylvia was shaking her head. ‘I think Alec is only making occasional connection with himself these days. Drinks like a fish? He should have gills by now.’

‘Yes,’ Dan said. ‘Alec’s lost it by now, I’m afraid. I think when Frances packed it in, that was him. Took a header into the bottle.’

‘No wonder Frances left.’

‘So how does Mary Sue come into it?’ he said.

‘Alec asked her to come with him, I suppose,’ Dan said. ‘He seemed quite pleased with himself. God bless him. As if it meant he could still pull. I suppose she was his beard for the night. I don’t mean he’s gay. His hormones would still need to be alive for that. But maybe she let him act as if he’s still a player in the game.’

‘Maybe she works for the Samaritans,’ Sylvia said sadly.

‘Oh, well,’ he said. ‘That scene. I suppose the difference is. If the mother says “the” hairbrush, it means cruelty to children. Because it would imply that it’s a regular event. Something the boy is familiar with. Whereas “a” hairbrush would suggest something with which he isn’t familiar, not something he recognises. And probably an empty threat. I’m with the writer on the importance of the difference.’