Weekend (5 page)

She looked across at the dress lying on the bed, its grey cloth so familiar. She put down her glass of wine. She stood up and took off her jeans, laid them lengthwise on the bed, wriggled out of the Lycra top, straightened it out and put it beside the jeans. She turned and looked at herself in the mirror.

The Janet Reger underwear had been her one serious indulgence for this weekend, a bigger one than she could afford. She was glad she had overcome her misgivings about the price. The silk bra and pants made her feel sensuous. Perhaps they would make somebody else feel the same.
Sensing tears almost come to her eyes as she contemplated her still attractive breasts so long starved of touch, she fortified herself with wine.

She picked up the grey dress from the bed and slid it over her head, smoothing it down past her hips. She took the broad black belt from the bed and buckled it round her waist. The alterations to the dress had taken the waist in, made it sleeveless and brought the hemline up. With the roll-neck, she thought it made her look like a nun who had broken out of the convent and made a few adjustments to her habit. She smiled to herself. That seemed appropriate. It was the last thing that Alan had bought for her and, in its original box-like style, sleeved and coming below her knees, it had made her look like a nun. ‘Where’s the wimple?’ she had asked him. She ran her hands down the contours that the dress emphasised. The libido strikes back.

She took off the dress and laid it carefully on the bed. She brought the phone across and put it on the dressing-table. She topped up her wine-glass and dialled Marion’s number. Marion answered after a long time, as usual. Vikki sometimes wondered if she was waiting to find out if the caller would give up.

‘Marion. It’s Vikki. You all set?’

‘For what?’

‘The trip. Tomorrow.’

‘Oh, yes. That.’

Even when you were sitting beside her, Marion often gave the impression of not quite being in the same room with you. But tonight she sounded as if she was in another country.

‘You did remember?’ Vikki said.

‘Of course. I’m packed. I wasn’t absolutely sure about going at first.’

‘Marion!’

Vikki immediately set about persuading her. She had phoned to give her own stalled sense of purpose a psychological tow from Marion’s imagined enthusiasm. Now she was dreading catching her inertia. By the time they had finished talking, Marion was saying she would definitely go. But when Vikki put the phone down, the conviction she had managed to impart to Marion seemed to have cost her her own. Aware of how much she might shock Marion, she stared at herself in the mirror, thinking she saw there a belated reveller who was turning up when the party was over. That was when she really cried. Turning the wine into water, she told herself. She let the tears work themselves out. When she looked back into the mirror, the mascara she had applied to have the full effect of her new appearance had spiked itself round her eyes.

Maybe she should be a Goth for the weekend, she thought. That would really shock Marion …

… who was sitting very still, as if imitating the nickname she knew some of the other students had for her: the Mouse. Why had she agreed to go on this trip? It intimidated her. Nearly everything did.

She sat with her cup of coffee going cold in front of her, resting on a copy of
Hello!
so that it wouldn’t leave a ring on the glass of the table. She wasn’t enjoying the coffee. She had never been sure if she went on buying this brand for the taste or because it had been advertised a while ago on television as part of a romantic serial. Did she imagine it was an elixir? Drink the brand, find the romance. Perhaps romance by proxy
was becoming a way of life for her. She glanced at the famous face staring at her past the rim of her cup.

The romance didn’t necessarily have to involve a relationship. That would have been a pleasant bonus but she had ceased to take that possibility seriously some time ago. If she was a mouse, she was a well-fed one. It wasn’t that she thought the not-unpleasant roundness of her figure disqualified her from attracting a man. It was just that, in her experience, it had so far disqualified her from attracting the kind of man to whom she would have been attracted. Being perilously close to forty, she found it difficult to imagine that she would attract him now.

‘The only talent you’ve got,’ her father had told her more than once (as he told her most things more than once), ‘is your stubbornness. And that won’t do you any favours.’

Perhaps it hadn’t. She remembered him lying in his coffin, his face having achieved that expression of unchangeable conviction about the nature of things it seemed to have been rehearsing all his life. Told you I was right, it seemed to say to her as she stood in his dim bedroom with the curtains drawn, and especially about you.

Maybe he had been.

‘People who only want to wear glass slippers always end up barefoot,’ he had told her, more than once.

She reflected what a cruelly sententious man he had been but she stifled the thought, not out of respect for his memory but out of respect for the memories of her own she still hoped to make. She had decided soon after his death that to spend too much time reacting against the powerful effect someone or something had had on you was to recharge that power. You defined yourself against its terms rather than finding your own. It became a continuing necessary part of you instead of
something beyond the negative influence of which you could finally go.

Looking at the holiday brochures showing through the glass of the coffee-table, she wondered again if she shouldn’t have spent all the money she once had on travel. Those two months travelling in Europe after her mother’s death could have been extended into her final freedom, she was thinking. She had enjoyed being in strange places so much. Even visiting the bullfight had been an unexpected thrill. Instead, she had been sensible and taken a mortgage on this flat.

Now she had to admit that her money wouldn’t last for ever, unless she saw for ever as a couple of years or so. She had decided already that, if she completed her degree, she wouldn’t be going into teaching. And the idea of being at university as a mature student no longer seemed as attractive as it had done, except for the creative writing class.

Perhaps she could just sell the flat and travel until the money ran out in some foreign place and she quietly brought out the bottle of Valium she had kept as her secret travelling companion. She thought of herself expiring romantically alone, having experienced many places, in a quaint hotel room in Paris or Vienna or Venice. Or Padova. She liked Padova. Especially the little square beside the Basilica of St Anthony. There was a small hotel where, when you closed the shutters, the darkness in the room was total. The staff had been kind to her.

But she couldn’t quite see herself as a romantic heroine. She worried about ring-marks on the table. Her escape from her stifling dissatisfaction with herself would have to be something more practical. She had always known that she would never have eloped without a road-map. She knew, sitting lumpily beside the coffee-table, that she would never be flying
to freedom. But maybe she could painstakingly tunnel her way out.

She thought yet again of the box-room. She thought of it as the entrance to her tunnel, had been conscious of it for a long time now as the only place from which she could seriously start. She had lovingly equipped it with the tools she needed. All that was lacking now was the will to begin to use them, the purpose for applying them. Maybe this weekend would help her find it. She rose, took the cup and went to the kitchen to rinse it out.

She went back and sat down on the couch beside the coffee-table. She hoped she had given some reassurance to Vikki, who was so vulnerable just now. But then the operation next week was not something any woman could face with equanimity, especially for someone who, as an only child with her parents dead, had no immediate family.

Vikki was being very brave about it. This weekend was to be her last outing before surgery. As far as Marion was aware, she was the only one Vikki had told about it.

It was interesting how much she knew about the people who were going to Willowvale. Perhaps seeing her as the Mouse (they had never called her that to her face but she was good at eavesdropping), people felt free to say almost anything in front of her. Perhaps they liked to feel they were shocking her. They weren’t. Nothing about people shocked her. Every horror she read about in the newspaper or saw on television she liked to confront calmly because it was telling her the way things were. She had always sent her imagination into situations and experiences she had never known herself, so that she could feel what others felt.

She knew the story of Jacqui Forsyth’s break-up with the apparently appalling Kevin. She suspected from certain
remarks Alison Miller had made that she had been involved with David Cudlipp at last year’s weekend. She knew that Andrew Lawson’s life outside university was devoted to his wife, who was housebound with illness. Devoted to her and the bottle, she suspected.

She thought of them a lot. She thought most of Harry Beck. That was inevitable, given that the key to his writing class was mutual honesty, and he led by example. She knew that he had had problems with the book he was working on.

‘I think I’ve discovered a new neurosis. The Penelope Syndrome. You heard of her? She was the wife of Odysseus. While she was waiting for him to get back from Troy … Twenty years it took in all. How do you explain that one to your wife? “That was some traffic jam on the M1.” She was pestered by men who wanted to marry her. Eventually she had to give them a time-limit. She said she would choose a new husband when she finished the tapestry she was working on. Every day they could see her weaving it. Every night she unravelled in secret what she had done during the day. The never-ending tapestry. That’s me. Every night my head unravels my belief in what I’ve written during the day. Just call me Penelope. But not in public, please.’

He had finished it now and had submitted it to a publisher. She had read all his published work, finding his books on Amazon with great difficulty, and that told you a lot about a person, she felt. She had seen him once in a bar called the Ubiquitous Chip. He hadn’t noticed her, of course. But the company he was in had dismayed her. One man in particular looked like a caricature of an aging gigolo. But there was more to Harry Beck than that. Most of the notes on the table in front of her were transcriptions of things he had said.

‘Does it matter? A day or a lifetime. Or one crowded hour
of glorious life. I suppose every book creates its own wilful timescale. Certainly, you can’t tell a story without it inhabiting time. Once upon a time, as they used to say. I suppose every story really begins: It was that time when …’ There was a pause. ‘Of course, you could get twenty different people writing about the same event and using that beginning. And still have twenty different stories.’

She leafed through some of her other notes, transcriptions she had extracted from his tutorials, which he had allowed her to tape. She had taken them mainly from the free-ranging chats they always had at the end of a class. She liked those times best. Usually then, with assignments decided, Harry Beck was just responding to their general questions about writing.

‘I don’t think you teach anyone to write, really. You might give them something useful to react against, right enough. That’s healthy. But what we do here is still valuable, I believe. You can let people see their mania is shared. They’re not alone in the padded cell. And, at the very least, it’s going to make you a more appreciative reader.’

‘I can only speak for myself. Writing a book feels for me like trying to ride a bucking bronco. And trying to go somewhere at the same time.’

‘How can you know there’s actually a book there when you start out? I don’t see how you can. I can’t anyway. It’s like a mirage. Sometimes you think you can see it. Sometimes you suspect there’s nothing there. You’re deluding yourself. But you have to keep going. And even once you’ve arrived. I suppose only other people sharing your belief that you’ve arrived somewhere real can confirm it for you. And then, these days, often the people publicly confirming your book’s reality aren’t very real themselves. I think you have to leave it to the individual lay reader. The dread of mirage remains.’

‘Posterity? Who says you can trust posterity? Think about it. This is posterity for all the writers who are dead. And look how undervalued some great writers are today. And how overvalued some chancers are. Nah. You’re on your own. No guarantees. Place your bet.’

She would be taking her notes with her and hoped she would be adding to them and finding out about more people.

‘Mickey Deans is going,’ Kate said.

‘I’ll leave him to you,’ Jacqui said. ‘I don’t rob cradles.’

Kate thought she might not mind. At least he might be more accessible than the men at the bar.

‘Does that mean Donnie Davidson’s going too?’ Alison said.

Jacqui touched both nostrils and sniffed, as if her nose were running.

‘With a truckload of pharmaceuticals.’

Kate realised that Jacqui had just spoken as if she would be going. It was necessary to encourage her with something more.

‘And it’s supposed to be haunted.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Willowvale. It’s supposed to be haunted.’

‘Ooh,’ Jacqui said. ‘There’s an idea. Maybe I could lay the ghost. That would be a first.’

Andrew enjoyed telling his students about the ghost of Willowvale. A recuperating soldier was first to claim he had seen it in 1919. Having turned a corner in the house at dusk, he saw a woman in a floor-length black dress at the end of a long corridor. She had a fierce white face and she appeared to be gliding towards him threateningly – perhaps, Andrew thought, because her dress concealed her feet. The soldier apparently didn’t wait for her to introduce herself.