Weekend (3 page)

‘What was that all about?’

‘Is he the part-time barman?’

‘Who is he anyway?’

‘Harry Beck,’ she said.

They obviously had never heard of him. She was remembering the sudden darkness of his eyes. They were intense. She liked that.

‘Anyway,’ the one called John said. ‘Then we started on the champagne. And it was Moët. That was a party.’

She watched him cross to the table and mix himself a drink. Whisky and water he took. Dan Galbraith called to him and he went over and sat on the floor beside Dan’s chair, leaning his back against the wall. She enjoyed the way he moved. She wondered what they were talking about.

‘I need a bit of company tonight,’ Dan was saying. ‘I don’t want to go into my fifties alone.’

‘You’ve got plenty of that, then.’

‘I don’t know about Sylvia’s insistence on the long dresses, though. A bit formal, isn’t it?’

‘I like it. I like seeing women like that. I don’t know. It makes me imagine a more romantic time.
Fin de siècle
or something. End of the nineteenth century.’

‘In a way it’s quite a good wake, I suppose,’ Dan said.
‘Burying your forties. That was a nice funeral oration you gave.’

‘It was meant to be about the future as well as the past.’

‘I know, I know. It’s all right for you. You’ve still got most of your forties to come,’ Dan said.

‘Uh-huh. But what am I doing with them?’

It was a remark thrown out casually that came back to attack him. He was mugged by his own question. While Dan reminisced gently, he found himself trapped among thoughts the question had released in him. His part in the conversation became mainly nods and vague sounds of assent.

What
was
he doing with his forties? He sometimes felt his nature was a beast he hadn’t learned to domesticate. It did what it wanted rather than what he tried to train it to do.

‘Remember the party we had when your first novel came out,’ Dan said. ‘That was an event.’

‘It was.’

And thanks for giving me a memory I don’t need at the moment. How many years ago was that? Fifteen? Sixteen? It was in a wine bar which had since disappeared. Passing the place where it used to be, he sometimes wondered if he had dreamed it. It was a Pizzaland now. He certainly seemed to have dreamed the possibilities with which he had sensed the place shimmering that evening.

Lodgings in Eden
had been out for three weeks then. He had decided to wait before having the party in case the book sank without trace and people wouldn’t know what they were supposed to be celebrating. But all the reviews that were in had been good. The book had reached number nine in a bestseller list. Since he had never again appeared on any such list, he had, of course, realised that they were things of no
serious significance. But then that entry at nine had seemed an omen of a bright future.

So many other things that evening had supported the feeling. He was standing among a lot of people who were happy for him and wishing him well. He was twenty-eight. He had already written a book that he was entitled to call, however briefly, a bestseller. Maggi was still with him and they had plans to choose somewhere to live where she could take a job teaching and he could write his next book. The publishers were happy and waiting for it. He had ideas for evermore. If this was what he could achieve at the first attempt, what might he be able to do over the next few years?

Not a lot, as it transpired. He still couldn’t understand it. How had something as solid as that moment turned into a mirage? Perhaps the first thing he had done wrong was to work so hard on the second novel. Perhaps success, like some women, is turned off by being courted too abjectly. It took six years for him to deliver
Winter in August
. When it was finally published, it felt like his second first novel, so long had it come after
Lodgings in Eden
. It emerged to a thunderous silence. Something in him died with the book.

His confidence was broken. It was as if another Columbus had set out to discover new worlds and landed on Rockall. The bleakness of where he found himself spread like a blight into the lives around him. He didn’t blame Maggi for leaving him. If he could have found the way to do it, he would have parted with himself. He made a half-hearted attempt at it by leaving Skye and coming back to Glasgow. But he brought his dead ambition with him, like a corpse in a suitcase. He unpacked it with his clothes and had sat staring at it for years, willing it to breathe again.

But the book of short stories he had published five years
later merely reaffirmed where he thought he was – trapped in a fantasy of his own making. They could have sold more copies of
In Places at the Time
if he had gone round the houses with them. He almost did.

He knew his reaction to his own failure was exaggerated but he couldn’t control it. Since his teens he had invested almost all his hopes in being a writer, and the high of his brief initial success had been so intense that he couldn’t adjust to the experience of coming down. He seemed to have spent the time since the failure of
Winter in August
in a kind of unsuccessful psychological rehab. Even sitting here with Dan Galbraith, he still couldn’t believe that what he had thought was an infinity of promise had contracted by now to waiting for a letter, which still hadn’t come. His future, he was thinking, had reduced itself to the contents of an envelope.

‘Sometimes,’ Dan was saying, ‘I wish I had achieved half of what you have.’

‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’

‘You’ve written something,’ Dan said. ‘Me? I’ve reached the dizzy heights of being a sub-editor. Your books’ll be there when you’ve gone.’

Where would they be? Recycled into toilet-tissue? If they survived, they would be like some of the more egregious tombstones you sometimes saw in cemeteries – proclaiming not the importance of the people who lay under them, just their misguided sense of that importance. And very seldom read.

The truth, he realised again, was that other people’s assumptions about his success were, in a strange way, what hurt him most of all. They were such a contradiction of what he felt was the truth about himself that they made a
performance of much of his life. He sometimes felt he was going around pretending to be somebody else.

Even his invitation to come here tonight had been partly related to the mistaken sense of him that people had when they knew of the books. He had been friendly with Dan for years and he would have been glad to come anyway. But he was also aware that Dan had been especially keen for him to be there because he was the nearest thing Dan could get to a half-baked local celebrity. Hence the speech. It was the equivalent of getting somebody who was known slightly for being known slightly to cut the ribbon at the opening of the supermarket.

‘And what have I achieved?’ Dan was saying.

He looked round the tastefully furnished room, saw the attractiveness of Dan’s wife and two daughters.

‘Look around you,’ he said.

‘I know, I know,’ Dan said. ‘I’m grateful for what I’ve got. I’m very proud of my family. But all I’ve managed to be is a sub-editor on a paper. I still envy you the legacy of words you’re leaving.’

Some bequest to the nation, he was thinking. Still, maybe they could use it as a warning to others on the folly of misguided ambition. He heard fake laughter somewhere, not so much a laugh as a shout with bells on.

He traced it to the man who had come in with her. He was sitting in a chair, gesticulating wildly at someone or something. It was hard to tell which, since his focus didn’t seem too precise.

‘All the same,’ Dan said. ‘You could have written a lot more. If you hadn’t been such a madman.’

‘Comes with the territory, I suppose. A sane writer’s probably an oxymoron. Anyway, journalism’s writing. Although
I’m not even a real journalist. I just write a column. But I’m not knocking it. I need it. I’ve got into the habit of eating.’

‘What about the poetry? You never try to publish any of that?’

‘I don’t write poetry. Who are we kidding? I write daft verses. Light verse, my man.’ He said it with a BBC accent, or what had once been a BBC accent. ‘So light, if you breathe on it too heavily you could blow it away. The only place I might get it published would be on a greetings card.’

She had crossed the room to the windmill in the chair. She seemed to be trying to reason with him, which couldn’t be an easy trick. They were obviously going to be leaving soon. He had missed his chance to connect seriously with her. When he had done the thing with the gin and tonic, it had felt dramatic and peremptory. Now it felt stupid. What was that supposed to achieve? I’m the drink-delivery man. Boldness was what was needed.

She had partly succeeded in calming the man down. He had gone into muttering mode. Now she was talking to Sylvia, who had been hovering – hostess in a state of mild alarm. Sylvia brought her a piece of paper and a pen, and began to use her mobile. It was taxi time.

She was writing something. He had hoped it would be a love letter to him but it was too short for that. Dan rose and went to talk to Sylvia. Putting the pen down, she started to walk. He was taken aback by how exciting it was to know that he was the one she was coming towards. She came and stood beside him, her back to the wall, and so close that her dress overlapped on his outstretched trouser leg. She sighed. ‘I’m going to have to leave soon,’ she said. ‘He’s just a friend. He asked me to partner him tonight. But I’ll have to see he gets back safely to his place.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said and put his hand under her dress.

He thought: What the hell am I doing? Get the handcuffs ready.

She thought: Ooh. No. That can’t be what I thought it was. It is. It is.

In the time it took her to believe the incredible, what she thought would have been her response was displaced by pure sensation. His hand was resting at the top of her calf. The hand didn’t feel aggressive. It felt as gentle as a bird nestling there. It was less threat than plea. By not rejecting him immediately, she became part of a conspiracy of two against the rest. She found that she was enjoying the conspiracy. She had wanted him to make some kind of move all night. Well, he had certainly done that. They were standing in a busy room sharing a secret intimacy.

Not having been arrested, he began to stroke her calf gently. She wanted to talk casually, about anything, she decided. She felt it was a way of adding to the clandestine sensation.

‘I still think you made up that stuff about Snarl,’ she said.

‘Only the name. Sadly enough,’ he said.

‘And Bruce?’

‘Bruce was real. Probably realer than most of us. Although this feels quite real.’

‘I know what you mean.’

‘The weather’s been pretty mixed, eh?’

‘I see they’ve had rain in California.’

‘This is a lovely way to spend an evening.’

‘I feel as if I could sing that.’

‘Feel free.’

Sylvia was signalling over.

‘Why do taxis always come at the wrong time?’ she said. ‘I
have to go. No, don’t get up. I want to remember you this way. But I do think you should leave now.’

His hand gently squeezed the back of her calf and then was gone.

‘Here,’ she said, giving him the piece of paper she had written on. ‘I was wondering whether to give you this. Now I’m sure. I’m going to check that article sometime for lies.’

He watched her get her coat and usher the man out with the help of Dan. He looked at the paper she had given him. It contained her phone number and her name: Mary Sue. Mary Sue.

His hand closed round the scrap of paper as if it were a nugget of gold. He leaned his head against the wall. He folded the paper and put it carefully in his hip pocket. He hoped he would still want to phone her when he was sober. Then he saw her come back in, taking off her coat. She said something to Sylvia. He watched her mix two drinks at the table. One seemed to be whisky and water. She turned and walked towards him until she was standing beside him, exactly where she had stood before.

‘He’s all right,’ she said. ‘The taxi-driver was nice. Said he’ll look after him.’

She handed him the drink that looked like whisky and water.

Sometimes the gods smile upon the lunatic, he thought.

‘Cannamore?’ Alison said. ‘Ends of the earth? It’s about an hour on the ferry.’

‘Her sense of geography is prehistoric,’ Kate said.

‘At least my sense of men isn’t. Like you, Kate. Dark pasts and romantic figures wrapped in mystery. Like a bloody opera-cloak. What’re you waiting for? To meet Byron in Tesco’s? He’s dead. Long time dead. Look at them.’

She indicated the young men at the bar. Kate followed her nodding head. She saw, first of all, the living representation of a thought she had often had: the physical variety of people is amazing. Wasn’t it incredible that, with all the people there were in the world, you couldn’t find two exactly the same? Even identical twins weren’t really identical. The term didn’t describe the reality, just the carelessness with which people observed the reality. And beyond a category like that, all was blatant and mind-blowing difference.

What life managed to do with limited materials was astounding. After all, how many different shapes could you give to something as basic as a nose? A bone, a lump of skin and two breathing holes. It wasn’t exactly, you would have thought, the stuff of infinite variation. How many eye-colours could you get? Not a lot, and you weren’t allowed to have different colours within any one iris. You couldn’t, for example, have striped eyes. That might have helped to vary things a bit. And mouths. Two soft folds of flesh around a set of teeth or the lack of them, as the case may be. It really was amazing.

Look at those men at the bar. Everything was slightly different about each of them. Height, weight, hair, features – everything. Looking at them, she realised what exactly she had against Dolly the sheep. Well, not against Dolly personally but against the whole idea of cloning. (Come to think of it, could you have anything against a clone
personally
, since it was not itself in the first place but merely an imitation of
somebody else? It would be like, say, standing in a cave with someone. And they insult you. And the insult has an echo. It would be like starting an argument with the echo. Instead of with the person who insulted you. Something like that.)