Weekend (15 page)
Authors: William McIlvanney
‘Read that,’ he said.
He seemed so enthused, she decided to humour him. She was surprised to find that the typescript wasn’t something of his own. It was a student essay written by someone called Veronica Hill. It was, she saw as she read, an attack on
Hôtel du Lac
, by Anita Brookner. She looked up at him. He was standing at the sink, watching her.
‘I’d better explain,’ he said. ‘I decided to get away from the spoon-feeding. I took away the safety net. The remit I gave them was to choose any more or less contemporary novel. Read it and react utterly honestly. All they had to do more than that was to overtake their own reactions and justify them, as well as just having them. That’s what Veronica wrote. Now read on.’
While she did, she was conscious of his movement around the room. He turned on a tap briefly for no reason she was aware of. He went into the fridge and took something out. The hissing noise suggested a can of beer being opened. She sensed him watching her from time to time. The feeling
annoyed her, implying he was impatient for the affirmative reaction he was obviously waiting for. She didn’t want to give him it. She felt the way she always felt when someone over-prepared her for something, a joke, for example. Statements like ‘This is the funniest thing you’ve ever heard’ always caused her laughter muscles to atrophy.
As she read on, she was glad that she didn’t need his help not to give him the response he wanted. She didn’t like the essay. One of the accusations it made against the book was snobbishness but she thought the terms in which the essay was conceived were themselves a form of snobbery. Expressions like ‘bloodless’ and ‘emotional virgin’ and ‘boringness under a microscope’ rankled with her. When she finally looked up from the pages, the sky was ash against the window.
‘Well?’ he said.
He was standing beside her now. He lifted her book from the table, turned it over to see the title and dropped it again, losing her place.
‘Where’s your Anne Tyler now?’
‘I like
Hôtel du Lac
. I don’t like this,’ she said. ‘She talks about a microscope. She might as well have read it through a telescope. She’s missed all the subtlety of the detail.’
‘What subtlety?’
‘Have you read the book?’
‘You know I have. And what you call subtlety I would call triviality.’
He lifted the sheets of paper.
‘That’s it then?’ he said.
‘That’s what I feel.’
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Not much point in preaching to the unconvertible. But that’s a terrific essay.’
On the way out he took a slug from his can of beer.
It had seemed not much at the time, just another of those sudden meetings when people who are living together can find they’ve bumped into a stranger in the kitchen. Now, sitting alone in a hotel room that had been booked for both of them, she saw it differently. He had perhaps been more of a stranger all along than she had imagined. She had decided at the time that he was being proprietary about his ability as a teacher. But now it felt as if his reaction went deeper than that. Maybe he was being proprietary about the writer of the essay. Maybe he was playing two women off against each other and awarding marks accordingly. Maybe she had been failing some kind of test. The thought chilled her with anger.
As she took the bottle of pills and replaced it in her travelling-bag, something suddenly occurred to her. That woman who had come through the door of this room with him tonight. Was her name Veronica Hill?
Wasn’t the dawn an incredibly reluctant thing? One lonely detectable glimmer of light and then nothing for ages, as if the day had been postponed. Please, no. It was like a workman determined not to clock on too early. Who put that ray of sun on? I told you to wait. You’d better leave it on now, but no more for the moment. Go and ask God what time he has. An aunt of his used to repeat, to the point of driving him crazy, ‘A watched kettle never boils.’ Maybe a watched dawn never happened. It had better. Trapped for ever in a hotel room with Jacqui Forsyth? Still, some people might not find that exactly a definition of hell. Without having to look, he was aware of her lying on the bed to his
right. She was still wearing the black satin dress. It would be rumpled, showing her thighs and maybe more. It was a good thing he had turned the chair towards the window. No fraternising with the enemy. The last time he’d glanced over, she had been staring out of the window as well. She hadn’t looked at him. She made a lot of noise. Turning and fluffing pillows and sighing. That was all right. As long as she didn’t talk.
‘What’s your background?’ she said suddenly.
‘I don’t have one,’ he said. ‘Only a foreground.’
That was neatly dealt with. He hoped she didn’t ask him to explain it.
‘What the hell’s that supposed to mean?’
He felt too tired to say. He felt too tired to argue. But maybe talking would take his mind off the dawn so that it might actually happen. He thought about his own remark. Probably he had been telling a kind of truth.
‘I suppose what that means,’ he said, ‘is I don’t really think about that stuff a lot. I was born at an early age. My parents were my mother and father. I had two sisters, both girls. I grew up. And here I am. Sitting in a fucking hotel room. Waiting for dawn.’
He wondered if her silence meant she was digesting his words. He wondered what there was to digest.
‘Had?’ she said.
He looked across at her. Her left foot was resting flat on the bed and he could see the full expanse of her thigh. She was still looking out of the window. He returned to doing the same.
‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘Had? Are your sisters dead?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Although maybe one of them might as well be. She’s married to a man in Sheffield who is so boring that
when he walks into a room …’ He paused. ‘He’s like CS gas coming in. Everybody falls asleep. There’s people falling off their chairs all over the place. But she accepts it. It’s bizarre. It must be a death-wish or something. Suicide by husband. The other one. She was in Findhorn at the last census. Hugging trees or something. And probably hoping to meet the great god Pan in the woods. God knows where she is now. No. They’re both alive. If that’s living. It’s just that we’re all very much in the past tense to one another. Had.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘My mother’s dead. My father has Alzheimer’s. I was a very late arrival. I tried to visit him sometimes. But it was like having multiple identities. I never knew who I was supposed to be.’ He paused. ‘Maybe Sandra had it lucky. She was an orphan.’
He was checking the dawn. Still on hold.
‘Were you abused?’
‘For God’s sake. Don’t start with the DIY analysis. No. I was never abused. Unless tweeness and fear of life and living in the past are forms of abuse. Maybe that’s why my sisters are screwed up. It’s strange being born in a mausoleum. But I always felt my parents gave me one great gift. They made me want to get the hell out as fast as I could. And not look back. But definitely no deliberate abuse. Psychiatric session over?’
Strangely enough, he felt it had helped him to talk. It was like checking out the luggage he would be taking with him and deciding how little it would weigh. He would be travelling light. He had begun to think it was probably for the best that Sandra had found him out. The marriage wasn’t working. Since she had given up her career and become a part-time librarian, her fixation with having children meant sex had become something they did in relation to the calendar. Getting a hard-on according to the phases of the moon. Every period
sent her into mourning for the child that never was. And then the endless conversations about adoption. He could admit to himself now that he was relieved when the pregnant unmarried girl whose child they had been promised had changed her mind. It was better to get out before Sandra found another donor, then brought home a present it would take a lifetime to unwrap and work out exactly what it was you had been given. He didn’t fancy the prospect of living with weird behaviour and always wondering where the hell it came from. Veronica would be simpler. He would see her tonight. He could arrange with Sandra tomorrow to get his stuff out of the house. It would take time but he was sure Sandra wouldn’t cause too many problems. It wasn’t in her nature. Without children, the financial arrangements shouldn’t be too burdensome. First things first. Disentangle from Jacqui as cleanly as possible. He was almost there. Come the dawn, I’ll be gone.
‘So you’re a self-made bastard,’ she said.
She waited for a reaction. He continued to stare through the window as if she weren’t really there. It irked her. This was like Kevin casually erasing her presence from his life. The difference was that now she was being obliterated by someone who was still in the room with her. It wouldn’t do. If he was dismissing her, at least he would know she had been there. She would leave her mark on him.
‘You sound about as substantial as a mayfly,’ she said.
‘Isn’t that what we all are?’ he said. ‘With delusions of grandeur. At least I’m honest about it. I don’t kid myself. Think about it. Any moment of any day. We come up against a bus, a virus, a slip on a staircase. Cheerio. I know a man who died choking on a chicken bone. Isn’t that a pathetic epitaph? We can assassinate ourselves trying to change a lightbulb. Our heart’s a time bomb. We’re fragile fuckers.
Every day news comes in about how ludicrous our pretensions are. But we won’t believe it. We live by denying our own reality. Well, not me. Life’s a con. Take the piss out of it before it takes it out of you.’
She stood up from the bed.
‘You are horrible,’ she shouted.
He turned towards her.
‘Why? Because I won’t share your fantasies, you silly bastard?’
She was glaring at him.
‘All this is just an excuse so you can treat people like shite. Even your wife. The unmentionable Sandra. You haven’t even gone to talk to her. Why?’
‘Because she’s liable to start a riot.’ (Or worse, accept a reconciliation.) ‘You heard the way she went on. The whole hotel might be turned out. I don’t need that.’
‘You don’t need anything. Or anybody.’
‘I certainly don’t need this. Fuck off.’
He was turning towards the window when his peripheral vision sent the message that she was on the move. Towards him, and coming fast. He stood up just in time to catch her wrist when she swung at him. He gripped her other arm as her body came against his. It wasn’t unpleasant being assaulted by her breasts. What was supposed to be a wrestling match alchemised into a strange dance of lust. He developed an erection. Her arms went round him and they were kissing. They writhed each other towards the bed and fell there. In their haste to be naked, the top of her dress was torn slightly. It wasn’t something she seemed bothered about. They undressed each other dementedly and he went inside her. As he ploughed desperately into her a thought came and went in her head like a scribbled note for later. This cancelled all the
distance there had been between them. As they climaxed together, his voice expressed his exultation.
‘Oh, my God,’ he wailed. ‘Oh, my God, Veronica.’
In the first, faint dawn light the room froze around them like a glacier.
Dear Mr Beck
I understand from our bank that you have already cashed the cheque for twenty-five pounds which we paid you for the ‘reading’ you inflicted upon us some time ago. This proves that you are at least not a fool in financial matters, for it was our intention, after eventually meeting to discuss the matter, to stop payment of your fee. We felt that we had every right to do this since the discrepancy between what we understood was being offered and what actually took place on that unfortunate evening would render you liable to be sued under the Trades Descriptions Act
.
The Committee of the Women’s Guild has empowered me to write on their behalf, expressing our profound displeasure over many aspects of your ‘performance’. First of all, let me explain the background to your appearance at our Guild. In this way you may receive some inkling of the responsibility you bear (something of which you are obviously not particularly aware) and of the damage you have done
.
Ours is quite a small congregation but, I think I may say, an active and forward-looking one. Our minister is progressive without being trendy. While he may not play a guitar in the pulpit, he is open to happenings in the wider world. This tendency naturally spreads to congregational activities. We
like to feel that we of the Women’s Guild are particularly abreast of things. We are in the main a reasonably youthful group, mothers whose children have not long started school – that sort of thing. We have in our ranks two primary-school teachers, a lady who used to work in a bank before motherhood called her to another role and, I think I am correct in saying, at least one graduate. I myself am a writer of contemporary romances. There is, of course, a sprinkling of older ladies but we are anything but fuddy-duddy. We are an intelligent and interested group, successful women who are members of the Guild not out of the lack of something else to do but from thought-through Christian conviction
.
It is because we are such aware people that we hit upon the idea of having a writer for an evening. I must admit that I do not feel wholly blameless in this matter. The other ladies have long known about my own career in writing and have frequently been agog with interest to find out what makes a writer tick. Here, I thought, was fertile soil for some lucky writer to cultivate. Here was an audience where a writer might sow his words with a certain relaxed confidence, secure in the knowledge that none of them would fall on stony ground
.
How we arrived at yourself as the writer in question should perhaps also be explained. As you may or may not know, filling the annual syllabus for an organisation like the Women’s Guild is no easy matter. Through lack of funds (I should point out that any funds we do acquire through such activities as bazaars and sales of work are given – to the last penny – to various charities, or to the fabric fund of the church), it is not our practice to pay a fee. Accordingly, the catchment area for our speakers is somewhat limited. We are
dependent upon the freely given time of others. This can impose a burden on their generosity
.
If I may illustrate this point. (If I seem to be labouring matters a little, that is purely because I would like to impress upon you the kind of people you have offended so deeply.) Mr Mayhew, the husband of one of our ladies, has every year, for three years running, given us a talk with slides on his visit to the Holy Land. This is a subject of perennial interest but we have not been unconscious of the fact that this is an unfair demand to keep making on Mr Mayhew. Nevertheless, he had again agreed to do it this year, in spite of being under considerable pressure at his work, and had been duly listed in the syllabus to that effect. Unfortunately, less than a fortnight before the date of his talk (i.e. the evening on which you joined us), his slides were stolen from his car. (Having given his talk to many other groups besides our own, Mr Mayhew frequently keeps the slides in his car for handiness.) We can only hope that once the thief (or thieves) discovered the nature of their swag, they were suitably chastened
.
This left us with a gap to fill and not a lot of time in which to fill it. Since it is one of our boasts that we have never yet let our members down by failing to provide them with a stimulating and educational evening, an extraordinary meeting of the committee was quickly called. It was there that your name came up. I had myself expressed a willingness to step into the breach if no other solution could be found when your name was mentioned by Mrs Andrews. (She has subsequently offered her apologies to a full meeting of the Guild.)
She made the point, I seem to recall, that her husband – William Andrews – had been an acquaintance of yours at university and, while he had not seen you since, she felt that
perhaps this acquaintanceship might be enough to prevail upon your better nature (we were under the delusion at this stage that you had one) to help us in our time of crisis
.
The rest of the committee were immediately interested. As I have suggested, most of us have a natural interest in things literary. A few of us had seen you on television and one of us even hinted, quite jocularly, that at least we would have something decent to look at as well as listen to. I give this detail to let you see the goodwill that was waiting for you here when you arrived and which you have abused so unforgivably
.
To come to the point, we were unanimous that you should be approached and post haste. I am sure you must be aware that this in itself was no easy matter. Mr Andrews informed us (his information seems to have come from a friend of his who seems to have bumped into you intermittently) that a letter was unlikely to elicit a response. Telephoning seemed to be the answer. I do not know if you are aware of how many times we phoned within the space of two days. Suffice to say, our financial expenditure was not inconsiderable. Eventually we learned that you would be willing, not to speak to us, but to give a ‘reading’. The unexpected sting in the tail was that your fee would be twenty-five pounds
.
This necessitated another extraordinary committee meeting, at no small inconvenience to the members. We had to meet in my house during the morning. I was, I am glad to say, against paying the fee. But some of the other ladies were, perhaps understandably, by this time keyed up at the prospect of meeting a ‘celebrity’. One of them had borrowed
Lodgings in Eden
from the library and had started to read it. In short, we acceded to your demands and there was even a tentative motion put forward that this be a regular fixture in
our syllabus – namely, that there be one evening each year when a literary figure should speak to us and that a small fee be put aside for this. We were to discuss the matter at our next committee meeting. Needless to say, the project has been abandoned. You have, perhaps irreparably, damaged the cause of literature in our small group
.
Having reached the decision to employ you, we were then faced yet again with the problem of making contact. I shall forbear to detail the subsequent trials and tribulations that attended our attempts to get in touch for the second time, nor shall I itemise the expense involved. This left me, for one, with a certain lack of confidence that you would turn up. So nervous was I right up to the final moment that, when you appeared, I was checking through the notes I had taken the precaution of bringing with me (on what constitutes romance in the modern world) in case I should still have to fill the breach. It is perhaps a measure of my innocence that when you arrived I thought we were lucky
.
All of the above, Mr Beck, may give you some small idea of the efforts we expended to have you with us, of the quality of audience that was waiting for you, of the opportunity for the advancement of literature that you have so wantonly thrown away. I cannot bring myself to list all of the ways in which you have let us down. It would be too painful. I shall content myself with some of the more salient features of your ‘performance’
.
You were, first of all, twenty minutes late. This may seem a trivial matter to someone of your ‘stature’. I can assure you it is not trivial to our ladies. Many of us have to make special arrangements, baby-sitters and so on, and, being people who run houses as well as taking part in educational and cultural activities, we have to keep to a pretty tight schedule.
Consequently, punctuality is of the essence in our activities. It may interest you to know that Mrs Hughes, for example, had to pay her baby-sitter an extra five pounds for the ‘privilege’ of listening to you. I can promise you she doesn’t think it was money well spent
.
But the unkindest cut of all in the matter of your lack of punctuality was not merely that you were late but the reason for your lateness, which I assure you was patently clear to all of us. As soon as you came in, I had the distinct impression you might require a compass in order to find your way to the lectern. Your lateness was very obviously not due to rushing to keep your appointment but had been of a sedentary nature. Not to put too fine a point on it, you were drunk – a condition that became progressively clear (or should I say ‘obscure’?) as you proceeded with your ‘reading’. Mrs Jenkins, who is one of our more elderly ladies and is, as a result, a little hard of hearing, admitted to us later that for most of the time she was under the impression that you were reading poetry in a foreign language
.
Any hope some of us may have entertained that you would ‘talk yourself sober’ was dispelled when we realised what was going on from time to time behind the lectern. Who would have thought something as innocent and naturally polite as providing a decanter of water and a glass in order to combat the ‘dry mouth’ so many speakers seem to suffer from could have been put to such a disgusting use? Whatever you added from the bottle in your pocket was no aid to sobriety. When you later added it to the tea we provided for you afterwards, I could not believe my eyes
.
I have no desire to dwell on this débâcle any longer than is necessary. But the outrage felt by all of the Guild demands that I make one or two further points. At our meeting
following your ‘reading’, we worked out by pooling our impressions that in your poems you used two swear-words (three if you count ‘hell’ – though I am myself against including this one in this era of greater, if rather dubious, linguistic freedom). As I suggested to the rest of the committee at the time, I feel pretty sure that a reading of these poems in print would find these offensive words mysteriously disappear. In other words, I believe you put them in on the night for cheap effect or perhaps through simple lack of self-control. Shame on you
.
But I had thought your depravity was fully revealed on the night itself. I had not thought worse was to follow. Miss Anderson, who works part-time in a bookshop, had her suspicions aroused at one point in the evening. Next day she duly did some excellent detective work. As a result, I am now led to believe that you did not, in fact, write the extract from ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. How you had the nerve not only to claim the poem as your own but to give a wholly fictitious account of how you came to write it, I shall never know. Mrs Barclay, one of our more compassionate members, confessed that she had been moved almost to tears by your account of travelling alone in New England and suddenly coming upon the stark bleakness of the place and finding what I believe you called ‘a mirror for your mind, the skull beneath your own skin’. You are disgusting!
Rest well assured that you will never address our Women’s Guild again
.
Yours in contempt
Margaret Bauer (Mrs), Chairperson
Dear Mr Beck
Thank you for sending us the three poems, which I am afraid we cannot quite find space for at the moment. Although it is our editorial policy to offer comment to writers rather than the cold anonymity of a rejection slip, I find myself at a loss to define exactly the dissatisfaction I felt about these poems. Perhaps it is that they seem too raw, too confused, too involved in the naked pain of life to convey a clear message to the reader
.
There is one in particular which seems to me very opaque. What is it about? I couldn’t be sure whether it was about the alienation of being in a foreign country or the futility of art or the prostitution of talent or a hymn to misogyny. I found the quotations (echoes of
The Wasteland
?) were too obviously tacked on, not effectively subsumed in the main body of the work. They are, I think, from Lowell? The incomprehensibility of the title didn’t help either: ‘Not Going to the Holy Land’
.
Please send us anything else in which you think we might be interested
.
Yours sincerely
Geoffrey Marsten