Weekend (8 page)

And Vikki, Marion was thinking. What about Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde? Marion had woken up this morning alone in a room beside a bed that hadn’t been slept in. Vikki hadn’t explained herself when she came to change before breakfast, rather bizarrely dressed. There had only been raised eyebrows and knowing smiles between them. But the knowledge wasn’t Marion’s. What had happened?

Just before midnight on Friday evening Vikki had sat in the room she was sharing with Marion. Marion was already asleep. She hadn’t taken any alcohol tonight, saying she was
saving herself for a Saturday night blow-out. That probably translated into gin and tonic twice.

Vikki had opened one of the four bottles of wine she had brought. She filled herself a glass. She sat down on the single bed in the Janet Reger underwear she had put on after Marion fell asleep. She told herself she was toasting the weekend ahead but the toast stuck in her throat. The wine might as well have turned back into grapes. She had already lost faith in her ability to make the weekend more than a passionate encounter with words, an affair with dead men called R.L.S. and J. M. Barrie. No first names here, please.

After arriving at the hotel she hadn’t changed out of the jeans and top she had travelled in. She didn’t have the nerve. Maybe it was just as well. Most of the students had dressed so casually that the clothes she had brought would have made her look like a fading actress who had lost her way to the première. Yet the young women students had still managed to be sexily attractive. Perhaps that was what being young did for you. Nubile bodies could look enticing in baggy combat trousers and a tank top. Youth was the ultimate cosmetic, one you couldn’t buy in any shop she knew of.

She glanced across at Marion, lying demurely immobile in her own single bed. She slept like a dead one and Vikki saw in her the corpse of her own future. Nights of rest untrammelled by the searching hands of men. She remembered the weight of Alan’s arm across her body, heavy in sleep, and suddenly missed it with agonising intensity, as if it were a limb of her own identity she had lost. It wasn’t him she missed, she knew. It was who she had been and could never be again. She was mourning herself.

She saw her clothes hanging in the open wardrobe. Their empty stillness accused her – the disembodied alternative
selves she might have been, if she’d had the courage. Maybe she should have had the nun’s dress lengthened and bought the wimple to go with it. A wimple for a wimp. She brought the dress determinedly into focus. It palpitated in her vision like a neon sign in Soho. It mocked her. You don’t dare come in, do you?

Why didn’t she? She remembered a boy in the woods near her home when she was fourteen. She was taking a shortcut through the trees to get to her house when she became aware of him, maybe thirty yards away. She could see him still. He had black hair that hung over his forehead almost to his eyebrows. His head was framed among leaves, turned fixedly towards her, watching. He was unlike any of the boys she saw in the classroom or the playground or on the street, swathed in attitudes that were too big for them, like adult clothes they were dressing up in. He seemed as startled as she was, raw with surprise. He was utterly who he was, an anonymous being caught in a shaft of sunlight, staring at a presence he had never seen before. He stood, as natural as an animal.

She stopped, transfixed by the intensity of his stare. He was transfixed by hers. A bird sang somewhere. Leaves tinkled in the breeze, like muted wind-chimes. She felt as if they couldn’t move. They were trapped in each other. Something had to happen to release them. It did. Suddenly he shouted across the green distance between them. At first, in her state of trance, it was sheer sound, as basic as the bellow of a beast. It troubled her. But as the noise resolved itself into words, she reverted to being a girl who had to get home. And quickly. ‘D’you want a ride?’

She swerved and ran. There was no sound of pursuit, no breaking branches, no battered leaves. Against her own wishes, she stopped and turned. She was gasping but it
was not an unpleasant sensation. He stood exactly where he had been, still visible down a tunnel of leaves, still watching her. He looked forlorn, as if he had been trying to pay her a compliment in a language that was foreign to her.

It wasn’t foreign now, she thought. As she raised the glass to her lips, she heard herself laughingly whisper ‘Yes!’ into it. She smiled and reflected ruefully that he was too far away to hear her.

Did such times accumulate till they defined you, trapped you in the refusal of yourself? There had been other times when rules that came from nowhere she could precisely locate (her mother, her father, what teachers said, conclaves of girls comparing notes?) had pre-empted what she felt, so that she prejudged the possibilities before they could happen and sentenced them to death, and thought it good.

The man at the café table in Madrid came back to her. Alan was visiting the stadium of Real Madrid. She couldn’t remember its name. She didn’t want to. They had spent a morning of loneliness in the Prado like vandals, their mutual displeasure spoiling everything they looked at. Their mood had desecrated Velázquez, defaced Goya. Only one painting hung in her memory from that visit. It was very small, easily missed. It showed the frontal image of a man’s face gazing pleadingly upwards, framed in flames. It was called
Un Alma en Pena
, which she later found out meant a soul in pain. The melodrama of her mood at the time had sympathised with the man in the picture.

They had been arguing about something she couldn’t recall. That memory lapse wasn’t uncommon. Any relationship, she imagined, must be familiar with those lost quarrels that had seemed so vividly important at the time, graveyards of unremembered angst. Perhaps, though they didn’t retain their
substance, they came back to haunt togetherness remorselessly till it proved uninhabitable.

Whatever discontent had been alive that day, it had breathed its contagion on the city. She had wanted to be anywhere but here. When Alan suggested visiting the stadium, it was no more than she bitterly expected. He knew she hated football. As he walked angrily away from her, she stood still and decided, not for the first time, that their marriage was over.

She began to walk nowhere briskly, as if she were distancing him from her life. She sat down suddenly at a café table. It was not an action but the absence of an action. She did it because there was nothing she wanted to do. She ordered a brandy, which was something she never drank. But as she sipped it, the very strangeness of what she was doing made her feel different from herself. She felt she might be interested in meeting her. She felt the thrill of being beyond a routine sense of herself.

She was aware of people all around her, walking, going to places she would never reach, and she wanted to have her own strange places to go. This city excited her.

She knew that a man at the next table was watching her. She looked at him. He smiled. He had a thoughtful face, dark eyes, a mouth like cruelty waiting to happen. It was an interesting mouth. She looked away.

An old man and woman were walking down the street towards her. The slowness of their progress was awesome. Each step seemed a task they might never finish. People were passing them as if they were stationary. It looked as if the sun would fell them before they made another yard. Before she could avoid the arrogance of the thought, she found herself wondering what point life could possibly have for them any more.

Involuntarily, she glanced again towards the man at the next table. She had the disconcerting feeling that he had read her mind. He raised his eyebrows, still watching her. He nodded towards the old couple. He pointed to her, he pointed towards himself. ‘Soon now,’ he mouthed in English. (He must have heard her ordering.)

She smiled dismissively but she did not take her eyes away from him. He nodded sombrely. He pointed to her again, he pointed again to himself.

He made a gesture with both hands towards the street. She knew that he meant they should go off together. He mouthed again in English: ‘I have a place.’

She turned her head away. She knew she wouldn’t dare to look back at him. She lifted the slip of paper that was her bill. She cursed the almost indecipherable faint blue numbers on the paper, afraid that he would come across and interpret them for her. She left what she decided was the price of the brandy and a tip. She stood up and walked away in the direction opposite to which the man had gestured.

She had been walking away ever since, she felt. Would she ever find the nerve to stop and turn back towards the risk? All she had done with the weekend so far was listen to Andrew Lawson’s lecture and phone three times to try to find out how Jason was getting on. But nobody had answered the phone at Alan’s place. Nobody needed her there. Nobody needed her anywhere.

Now here she was, sipping wine alone, unless you counted Marion lying like a figure carved in stone. She could have been doing this as easily at home. She stood up with the glass in her hand and gazed at herself in the full-length mirror fixed to the wall. She thought she was looking good. She struck what she felt was a seductive pose and stared at herself provocatively,
as if daring the woman in the mirror to step out of it and merge with her.

Perhaps the woman needed more encouragement from her. If she hadn’t had the nerve to put on anything daring in public, why shouldn’t she at least do it in private? Maybe she just needed practice. She was already wearing beautiful underwear and suspender belt and stockings. She had even put on her highest heels, as if she were drinking in a brothel, waiting for her next client, with Marion the unwitting sleeping partner. Why not complete the ensemble?

She drained her glass and put it on the desk against the window. She took the dress from the wardrobe and wriggled into it. She put on the black leather belt. The dress showed a lot of leg.

She contemplated herself in the mirror. She had an urge to walk up and down but was afraid her heels on the thin carpet might waken Marion. She wasn’t satisfied. The dressing-room wasn’t where you performed. She smiled to herself. You needed a stage for that, even if the theatre was empty. She smiled at herself again. In her case, especially if the theatre was empty. Why not? They must all be in their beds by now. She giggled. If anybody saw her, maybe she could pretend she was sleep-walking. If she couldn’t brass it out under these conditions, when would she ever?

She refilled the glass and drank the wine in one gulp, trying to make sure that the fuel for her boldness didn’t run out. She put the glass down and looked at Marion as she tiptoed across the room. Opening the door, she waved theatrically to the sleeping figure. She stepped out into the corridor and closed the door softly.

She listened. There was no sound. She walked regally along empty, carpeted corridors until she came to the main
staircase. She paused there. The ridiculousness of what she was up to put a wobble in her self-confidence, like a broken heel. Surely she wasn’t really going to do this. Yes she was, some desperate dread of returning sheepishly to that room was insisting. If she went back now, the door she closed would close on her for good. She could always say she had thought the bar was still open. Swingers were like that.

The way she came down the staircase, Rhett Butler might have been waiting for her at the bottom. Through the glass door in the hall below, she could see most of the reception area. No one was there. In the silence of early morning the building seemed to hum, like a generator. She walked towards the large residents’ lounge which adjoined the small bar. As she came nearer, she noticed that the lounge wasn’t completely dark. A dim light seeped out to stain the carpet for a short distance in front of the door. She stopped beyond the reach of the light. Listening, she heard an intimacy of murmured voices. She thought she should turn away but she couldn’t resist approaching. She peered carefully through the doorway.

A lamp in the far corner made a small bell of light within which two people sat. Their faces were leaning towards each other. He was dark and she was fair. They had the attractiveness of the utterly preoccupied, the innocence of those completely absorbed in being with one another. Their postures were not passionate but totally intense.

From this angle she couldn’t make out who the girl was. The boy was Mickey Deans. He had a reputation for aggression but she had always thought he had the kind of dangerous good looks that could make a woman wish she were young again. She was glad she couldn’t hear what they were saying. It would have felt like a profanation of their closeness.

She turned quietly away and walked towards the door of
the bar. The place was shadowed, only a little light from the corridor mitigating its gloom. She went and walked among the tables, imagining herself unfazed by many people sitting there.

She stood at the end of the bar, ignoring the metal shutter. She turned towards the door and said, ‘Oh!’ before she could stop the sound.

A dark shape, not unlike a bear, stood just inside the doorway. She wasn’t sure what it was, let alone who it was.

‘Vikki,’ a dark voice said. There was a pause. ‘You look amazing.’

She was startled first that the shadow knew her name and, second, that she knew the name of the shadow.

Names are interesting. Jekyll. Hyde. Utterson. We should, of course, be careful of deducing galaxies of significance from atoms of meaning. But the primitive belief in the sympathetic magic of names has maybe a particular resonance in this story of a man who renamed himself. Naming as incantation. A summoning forth. As you call it, so it will be.

Sandra, Marion was thinking, as she looked round the room, wondering about Vikki’s absence for the second successive night. It was such a pleasantly ordinary name for such a bleak, dark woman. Presumably the incantation her parents had been performing in naming her hadn’t worked too well.
Maybe they should have called her Deirdre. Sorrow seemed to suit her. But perhaps all christenings are unintentionally ironic, adult wish-fulfilment imposed on a contradictory reality.