Weekend (26 page)

How long was it since he had been as honest as that to himself? He sat at his desk as if he were in the dock, letting people he barely recognised file in and testify against him. Were they really talking about him? Were they telling the truth?

The woman from the writers’ conference. He couldn’t be clear where or when the conference had taken place. She was a very attractive woman and in the bar afterwards they had talked so suggestively that he vaguely assumed they had made an assignation, though perhaps his reception-system had been several drinks beyond precision. Later he heard her give her room number to another writer and retire. The chosen man loitered casually in the bar for a long time, holding forth to a small group of devotees. Having listened to enough of the
writer’s self-advertisement, he went upstairs to the woman’s room, quietly opened the unlocked door, stripped and climbed into bed with her in the darkness.

‘You took your time, darling,’ she said huskily.

She embraced him fervently and suddenly drew back. She stared at him in the dimness while he waited for the police to be summoned. She smiled.

‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said. ‘What a pleasant surprise.’

After they had had sex and had fallen asleep, he was wakened suddenly by a loud scuffling noise at the bottom of the bed. A shadowy ogre stood there in the dark. It was the other writer. Naked under the duvet, he lay watching the man with a certain nervous fascination, unaware of any book of etiquette that told you what to say in situations like this. But the writer seemed to have read one.

‘I,’ he said, ‘could write you under the table any time,’ and swept from the room, leaving the door open.

He thought he had better close it. As he came back to bed, the woman spoke.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I don’t really know him.’

That’s all right, then.

Thinking back, he couldn’t believe that he had once done that. He couldn’t have been the person who risked being arrested to climb into bed with a stranger. Who was that masked man?

He couldn’t stand having any more witnesses recalled. It was enough. He pleaded guilty to whatever the offence was. Trivialising human relationships? Undervaluing his own life and, by implication, those of others? Any women like that had been innocent. All they had done was unselfconsciously express the individuality of their own sexuality. He respected them. What he couldn’t respect was his own part in those
experiences. He had reduced sex to a game of solitaire for two. The other person was just the deck you were playing with. If you spent your life body-surfing, you couldn’t expect to come ashore at some significant place. You had to accept that you would run aground in the same old anonymous sand. He was guilty all right. What troubled him now was what the sentence might be. Turning into Sunbed the Sailor? Perhaps he was already serving it.

He thought of that night in the Ubiquitous Chip, when the three women he called the Post Romantics had casually disembowelled Sunbed with a few oblique sentences. He had been condescending enough at the time to feel sorry for Sunbed. But might they not just as well have been referring to him?

He had sat briefly with Mary, Fran and Christina that night and was about to move when Sunbed came in and went to the bar to order, an act that in itself might mean he would be in for a while. It might be better to stay seated in case you had to talk to him. The nickname had emerged mysteriously from the vox populi and gained currency. You could see why. His face wouldn’t have looked out of place hanging from an orange tree. And often when he had ordered the regular Cockburn’s, he would hold it up and look at it and say, for the benefit of anyone within earshot, ‘I see a girl in every port.’

‘Oh, no,’ Mary said. ‘Look who it is. If he comes over tonight, he gets it. All right? As we rehearsed it.’

Fran and Christina nodded. Those were ominous nods. If their heads had had thumbs, they would have been vertically down. Sunbed had decided that he fancied Mary and had once told him in confidence that reciprocation of the feeling was eventually ‘inevitable’. Perhaps the word Sunbed had been looking for was ‘impossible’. He was dealing with three divorcees who hadn’t liked the settlements.

‘Take your cue from me,’ Mary said.

Wearing his Clint Eastwood coat as if it could protect him from words, Sunbed came smilingly over with his glass of port and sat down.

‘How are you, ladies?’ he said. ‘Your evening is now complete.’

Nobody said anything. Mary nodded.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘As I was saying. Maybe when we get past the male member as fetish, we’ll be getting somewhere.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Christina said. ‘And the conditioning starts young. Though I’m hoping my two girls have managed to escape it. I remember changing Ewan’s nappy once. The girls are watching. Anna would be three. Sophie six. “What’s that?” Anna says, pointing at his penis. Sophie’s recently seen a friend’s son just after he’s come out the hospital, with the umbilical cord still projecting. “Oh, that,” Sophie says. “It’s all right. It falls off in ten days or something.” ’

‘At which point, no doubt,’ Mary said, ‘Ewan refilled his nappy and said his first word: “No-o-o!” ’

‘But maybe Ewan hasn’t escaped the dreaded male conditioning,’ Christina said. ‘Another time. He would be about four. He wanders into the bathroom when his dad’s having a bath. And I hear him saying, “You’ve got a really big one, Daddy.” I hear Vince laughing and he shouts, “Say that again, son. I don’t think your mum heard you.” “I did,” I shouts back. “And that boy gets his eyes tested tomorrow.” ’

‘I think it’s called forty—forty vision,’ Mary said.

‘Maybe Vince was playing with the loofah again,’ Fran said.

Or words to that effect. And so on. Sunbed didn’t try to proposition Mary that evening, seeming to need another drink
very quickly. Maybe he should have joined him. He did so now, in a way, by getting up, pouring a whisky, watering it and coming back to his desk.

But he didn’t want to belong in that foetid locker-room where Sunbed seemed to feel at home. He suddenly remembered that Mary Sue had referred to having a child. Or was it children? Yes. A daughter and a son. She said they had been staying with friends the night of Dan’s party. The name ‘Mark’ emerged from somewhere, hovering around him in a menacing way. They could be problems.

He absently fingered the piece of paper with Mary Sue’s number on it.

I suppose what I’m suggesting is that the oracle consulted by the father of Oedipus is articulating our animal identity, the way we are born. And that the life lived in attempted defiance of the oracle is our social identity, the way we try to be. And that the conflict between them is never quite resolvable. What we have conceived of as humanity is a state we aspire to constantly rather than one we live in. For us, to live is to be endlessly conflicted. Think of the beginnings of this story. Even the initial act of the father is fatally compromised. He doesn’t just kill his son, like a wolf devouring its young. He cripples him and gives him to someone else to leave on a hillside. It is neither the animal act of conscienceless slaughter nor what we would think of as the fully human act of sparing a life. It’s a crossbreed, not fully of one species or the other. The maiming of the feet. Oedipus becomes the duality of our nature. His father
abandoned him, which in itself would simply have restored him to his animal nature. But the father also has the human ingenuity to pierce his feet, which cripples his animal nature. The whole play is the tragedy of compromise, the compromise that is our nature.

He closed Witherspoon’s pamphlet and let it rest on his lap, wondering why he had taken the trouble to search for it in the first place. Perhaps, being alone with the body of Catriona in a house now uselessly adapted to her survival, he felt a kinship with Muldoon in Willowvale at the end: both had ended up living in a house the purpose of which had become meaningless.

That must have been a strange time for Muldoon. He could imagine the visionary wandering the empty chambers of his vision. It was then he added a few haphazard features to the building. It was as if he already knew that Willowvale would never be anything but the tomb of his ambitions and he would make it express what his life had taught him.

One of these features, like a bitter afterthought, was the series of six gargoyles on the eastern corner of the structure, facing the mainland. Five of these were traditional grotesques, as if copied from some medieval handbook of frightening faces. The sixth looked strangely modern, might have belonged to Muldoon’s time. It showed the face of a young woman, a face which might have been beautiful except for the distortion of its expression. The mouth was distended horribly, wide open in what seemed to be a scream no one would ever hear. Whatever the eyes were staring at, you hoped you
never saw it. The frozen hair streamed upwards as if the wind had caught it. Her agony was perpetual.

He suspected he recognised her. There had been an incident in Muldoon’s life that Witherspoon referred to briefly as being indicative of his subject’s compassion. It could have been equally expressive of his guilt. A young woman in one of his mills had had her hair caught in a loom, was pulled into the machinery and partly ingested by it. The burial of what was left of her was paid for by Muldoon. He also made what was for the time a generous settlement on her family.

His conviction that the event must have been a constant companion of Muldoon seemed to him supported by the presence of that face placed startlingly on his house towards the end of his life. Perhaps that death was to him what the Homestead Strike was to Carnegie – a parallel between the two which Witherspoon carefully didn’t draw.

Carnegie was always evasive about the brutality with which Homestead was crushed, an attitude made easier because he had been abroad when it happened. Perhaps he had needed to do that to believe in the purity of his philanthropy. Bloodstained idealism foretells the impossibility of its own realisation. Muldoon as well may have understood in the failure of his own idealism the pollution of its source in things like the death of the young woman. His good intentions were corrupted by what was supposed to enable them.

The gargoyle woman was perhaps the key to the story of Willowvale. More than the unnecessarily large foyer that suggested it would never quite be merely a hotel, more than the impractically grand staircase that renovations had so far failed to make conform to common sense, she defied the present’s mundane definition of the place. She silently declared the truth of Willowvale.

It was a stone dream. But part of the dream was nightmare.

Of course. Perhaps that was why he had wanted to read about Willowvale again: it was a massive monument to the kind of futility his own life had been tritely expressing, and some part of him had always known it. It gave him understanding. Or perhaps it was just that he had needed to connect the tawdriness of what he felt his life to be to something big, an imparting of grandeur to his small failure, the way religious people say farewell to brief anonymous lives in hymns that resonate stubbornly with eternity.

He, too, wanted more than this for Catriona. She shouldn’t die as unnoticed and quiet as a leaf. She would have no hymns, having always wanted a humanist funeral. She would have no monument, wishing her ashes to be scattered in Loch Lomond. But the rest of his life would be her commemoration. It wouldn’t be lasting, but how many things were?

He would live in memory of her. That meant there could be no repeat of his earlier compulsion to phone Vikki Kane. He sat thinking deliberately about Vikki. He contemplated her long and carefully, naming her parts honestly but emotionlessly to himself, as if performing an exorcism. Her eyes confirmed you just by looking at you. Her mouth imparted its hunger to your own. Her smile could induce a sweet derangement in you. Her breasts were awesomely exciting. All right. But all that was over for him now.

It was then he became aware that he had an erection.

It seems to me that every aspect of Sophocles’ play feeds into the same central meaning. The prophetic blindness of Teiresias, for
example. Teiresias is a blind seer who was claimed to have had the experience of being a woman as well as a man. Oedipus summons him to find out what is polluting the city. Very reluctantly, Teiresias eventually leads Oedipus to the truth – the pollution is himself. Teiresias in his double sexuality is like the incarnation of one of the polarities of our nature. He is the social being in complete ascendancy. He is all knowledge that is lost in the natural world, that leaves the animal side of him a helpless hulk that has to be led around like a dog on a leash. He is power paralysed, unable to fulfil itself in action. He is mind that is almost omnipotently present everywhere and is crippled in its immediate context. Oedipus is his counterpart. He is all action, which has taken him beyond any deeper knowledge of himself. He is virtually omnipotent in his immediate context but powerless to understand that context in its wider implications. The one knows more or less everything about himself but can do nothing about it. He can only know. The other can do just about anything he wants but doesn’t know himself. He can only be. Where they meet is in the last stage of the riddle. Each fulfils the last stage of the Sphinx’s prophecy. Each incarnates the meaning of the riddle, tapping his way forward with a stick. They are the three-legged animal, nature crippled by the ability to conceptualise. The Sphinx’s revenge. The Sphinx wins.

She called, ‘Mark?’

It was often the first word she said when she came into the house. The question always followed the name like a plea to the Fates. If he answered, it meant that he wasn’t lying somewhere hopped out of his head or in hospital or dead
by his own hand. The teenage world he lived in seemed to her full of shadows she dreaded would some day materialise into a disaster, the grief from which would then set up house with her for the rest of her life.