Remedy is None (17 page)

Back in the tea-room, she found that Peter still hadn’t arrived. She sat down to wait. She hoped that the football team had won, knowing the importance of accidental trivia to any plan. Her tea-cup had not been cleared away, and she tilted it mechanically in her hand, looking at the dregs like a spae-wife trying to foretell a surprise visit from which happiness will come.

Like a happy omen, Peter came into the room, announcing his mood with a smile.

Coming up to the table, he said, ‘Come on, Cleopatra. Tonight we eat the big dinner. Your barge is waiting.’

‘To what do we owe this?’ she said, laughing. ‘Did your team win?’

‘And that’s the least of it. A double up at Catterick, that’s worth a good fifty quid. And I just had it from Ritchie Evans there . . . You remember Ritchie? At Bert’s party the other week. The one that played the piano – a real case. I saw him at the football there. He has it on the bush telegraph that they’re polishing Carruthers’ shoes for me to step into. Seems just about a certainty. Ritchie’s never been wrong yet. I knew Carruthers had just about done the old hara-kiri with the hash he made of that last contract. But I didn’t know the funeral would be so soon. But that’s the way it goes. And I’m not complaining.’

Her congratulations were drowned in his own talk and hustling activity as he conducted her out into the street. Her reaction didn’t matter too much, anyway. All he needed was her presence, like a dictaphone into which he could tell his urgent happiness, someone with whom to talk his feelings into shape. He was away ahead of her, making conjectural memos and dusting the seat of office, speaking to various people from his new status. Any contribution she could make to the enthusiasm he was generating was necessarily so indefinite as to be insignificant beside his own.

‘This is my night. Keep with me and I’ll give you some,’ he said, stepping aside to let people pass with a proprietary smile, as if he was leasing them the pavement.

When they reached the car, he was still talking, throwing words about like baw siller. Driving, he showed none of the usual impatience that seemed to be set in motion with the engine. Normally, he was an extreme sufferer from driver’s disease, that jaundiced disillusion with humanity that afflicts those who observe the world through a windscreen. But tonight the car seemed to run on solicitude. He smiled at
people overtaking him, he slowed down to wave cars out of side roads, he treated jay-walkers like amusingly mischievous children, and the horn was redundant. It was a lot more than Mrs Whitmore had hoped for. The omens were very favourable. She was tempted to put her suggestions to him there and then, in the intimacy of the car. But she decided against it. Better to wait and let his thoughts come to terms with one another before introducing a stranger to them. He was so taken up with himself at the moment that the mention of anything extraneous to his imminent promotion would be like an insult.

‘It’s nothing short of the “Royal” for us tonight,’ he had said, and that was where he took her.

They had a long aperitif in the lounge bar before making an expansive entrance in the dining-room, a bowing waiter preceding them like a red carpet. Peter enjoyed ordering the meal and choosing the wine, a Beaujolais. All through the meal they talked about the promotion. It was a very happy and successful hour and a half, in which the food and the drink and the talk supplemented each other perfectly, words adding savour to meat and being washed down with wine. It was an inspired and sustained orchestration of enjoyment, the first movement of which ended when she came back to the simple repetition of how wonderful it was that he should get the job, a remark which had been the motif of the entire meal. But Peter brought that motif to an end when he said that they mustn’t be too presumptuous, because he hadn’t actually been given the job yet. Having infected her with his own enthusiasm, he was now schooling her in how it should be cured. That was the frame of mind he was in, a one-man-band of a mood in which he couldn’t help wanting to play all the parts. And he struck the chord that gave the evening its second movement with his next remark, spoken after he had finished the wine.

‘My God, Jane, you look wonderful tonight,’ he said, seeing her through three rose-tinted glasses.

The opening theme of the second movement had had as
prelude the warmth and stimulation of the meal and the wine, and had been hinted at in glances and moist lips and eyes that sent mute familiar signals of what was ahead. It did not have to be articulated. It was the more effective for not being articulated. But it continued and grew in certainty when they moved from the dining-room back into the lounge. They found a table in a quiet part of the room and, talking and sipping a few more drinks, they gradually brought the feeling in them to a higher pitch. It wasn’t so often now that their physical attraction for each other reached such a spontaneous mutual expression. At first it had frequently hit them with electric immediacy, stunning them into unconsciousness of what was going on around them in restaurant or living-room. Then everything else tended to be an unbearable obstruction between them and the consummation of what they felt. Now, with the adeptness with which every relationship leavens the flatness of its own custom, they savoured the interim, making it contribute positively to what lay beyond it. They did not attempt to hurry the evening towards its culmination. Rather they deliberately side-tracked themselves, seemed to lose sight altogether of the tacit tryst they had made between them, tantalizing their own desire. They detoured down comments on current news, dawdled in irrelevant discussions of their friends, disappeared behind short silences, leaving here and there small sensual clues, a long promissory look through an ineffectual veil of small-talk, laughter that was there before the cause for it, a languid stretching, the secret markings that only they understood. And all the time Mrs Whitmore was pleasantly biding her time, preparing her small, affectionate ambush.

She waited till they had about three-quarters of an hour remaining to them in the lounge. She had wanted to put it off as long as possible and at the same time to have the atmosphere of the lounge as an ally in case she was forced to discuss it at length. Conversation drifted for a moment into silence. Having grown sufficiently accustomed to his new image of himself, Peter had been busy being gallant to her, making her
feel at home in his happiness. He had just been joking with the waiter, giving her an oblique compliment. When the waiter had brought the drinks and left them, she decided to speak.

‘Peter,’ she said, ‘remember we discussed going down to Kilmarnock? Well, what about it? Could we? I would like to see them.’

He prevaricated with a sip of whisky.

‘Not now, Jane,’ he said. ‘Don’t let’s talk about it tonight, eh? We’ll just keep tonight for celebrating. This is a night for Whitmores only. Exclusive lease.’

‘But we’ve put it off already. Please, Peter. It would just complete the night perfectly for me. Just say we can go down. That’s all.’

Peter took another sip of whisky and waited vaguely for the reaction of his stomach as if thinking was a gastronomic process.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll go down to Kilmarnock. Soon. All right? We don’t have to name the day, just yet, do we?’

But concession is tutor to demand, and reading his mood correctly, she had no intention of leaving it at that.

‘No, of course not,’ she said. ‘But I’ve been thinking. Well, since the football team goes down to Kilmarnock next Saturday . . .’ She gave him a minute to turn the fact over before she proceeded to planting. ‘Well. I could come down with you. You could go to the match in the afternoon. And I could do some shopping. And at night . . .’

Too late, he realized what was happening. The loophole of the indefinite future became a lasso on the present.

‘It’s ideal really,’ she said, pulling it tight.

‘But right out the blue like that? They won’t even know we’re coming.’

‘But they wouldn’t know anyway, would they?’

‘They might not be in.’

‘They might not be in any other time as well. That’s a chance we’re taking any time.’

‘But... I just don’t fancy it, Jane. I don’t even know them. And I’m quite sure they don’t want to know me.’

‘They will once they’ve seen you.’

‘I wish my bookie was laying odds on that.’

‘Come on, Peter. For my sake. Please. Just give it a chance. That’s all I’m asking. Just come down with me and see. That’s all. Please, Peter.’

Peter shook his head, not sure whether it was in refusal or resignation. There should have been objections, but he had mislaid them somewhere in his immense feeling of well-being. All he could find was a vague and inexpressible misgiving, an incommunicable fragment of the reasons against it that he should have been able to provide. He was too happy to argue vehemently and he couldn’t bring himself to spoil the conclusion to the night that he had been looking forward to. But he couldn’t escape a sense of treachery in the bright warmth and the murmur of soft voices and the gentle, molten passage of the whisky. He might have known there would be something like this at the end of such a day, the pay-off of pleasure. It had all been just too good. So here was the evening presenting him with the bill. Yet he still felt too generous to quibble.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘All right,’ and an incipient huff surrendered to her smile.

Mrs Whitmore’s happiness was complete. The room froze into a reflection of her joy and everything and everyone in it seemed to be employed on her behalf. She was so happy that she felt a little guilty. Pleasure of such intensity seemed somehow forbidden. She felt its physical luxury enclose her like a net. But its meshes were silken, silken. Slowly, they were drawing curtains on the evening, and ‘bed’ flashed like neon in the warm darkness of her mind. All that remained was to find some words to fill the interval, some mundanities of conversation, the more ridiculous the better, so that they didn’t disturb her anticipation by involving her interest.

‘Tell me about the football, Peter,’ she said. ‘What happened?’

Part Two

Chapter 14

‘
THEN MITCHELL GOT HOLD O
’
THIS LOOSE BALL. AH
mean it looked as if there was nae danger. He’d hardly had a shove at it up to then, as well. That’s the thing aboot Mitchell, though. He can lie out a game for eighty-five minutes. But if ye just get ’im on it for the ither five, you’re home to tea. Anyway, this ball broke to ’im, ye know? He was standin’ facin’ his own goal too. He trapped it and turned in the wan movement. An’ then without stoppin’ he brought it right past the back, just as if he wisny there. Ye woulda thought the ball was fixed to his foot wi’ elastic. He moved in to about the corner o’ the box, an’ the centre-half cut right across. Then it was just a blur. Mitchell kinda juggled the ball over the centre-half’s foot. His right foot. An then, still in the same position.. .. Ah mean ye woulda thought he would shove it in tae Cairns. But naw. His right foot was still in line wi’ the centre-half an’ he blutered it wi’ his left. Really low an’ right inside the post. Inch perfect. Travellin’ like a train. The goalie was naewhere. No chance. It was like somethin’ out the
Rover
. Wasn’t it, Jim?’

‘Apart from the questionable literary allusion,’ Jim said in his professorial voice, ‘your account may be considered more or less accurate. It was a great game, though, Charlie. You shoulda been there. The boys was glorious. They really was.’

‘We were standin’ at the usual place too,’ Andy said. ‘We thought we would see ye there. Wee Alex Andrews was there. Shoutin’ like a daft yin.’

‘Naw. Ah don’t know,’ Charlie hedged. ‘Ah just didn’t fancy it. Couldn^t be bothered.’

He was still recovering from the surprise of Jim and Andy visiting him like this. Lately he had lost any sense of the phases of the week. The focus of his life had so shifted that
time lost all perspective, ceased to be ordered into a series of habits that promised to recur indefinitely into the future. Now suddenly into his mapless despairing thinking had come Jim and Andy, proclaiming Saturday night. With their smart suits and Italian shoes and their bright complementary appearances, they were like a vaudeville team. Their conversation too was sustained cross-talk, with catch-phrases and cross-references. They often told things in duet, finishing each other’s remarks. Mutual acquaintance had so worked on them that when they were together they seemed to speak parts written by habit. Listening to them, Charlie felt a response to their glib patter and easy acceptance quicken in himself. Because of the sense of dispossession of himself that he felt, the ease with which they seemed to inhabit their identities impressed him as something much finer than in truth it was. Its effect on him was almost apocalyptic. Sometimes when you think too deeply into the reasons of your life, uprooting every habit and blighting instinct with questions, your being becomes so barren that all you can do is let it lie fallow for a while and wait for any seeds of chance to blow in and take root. To Charlie this seemed such a moment. He had thought himself into limbo and now suddenly into it had happened these two people who were their own reasons. They seemed effortlessly to contradict Charlie’s despair. Being with them, he couldn’t help wondering if they didn’t have the right of it after all, being content just to go on from day to day being themselves. He had painfully left behind him everything he had accepted before and taken up his lonely position, entrenched in his own despair. And now Jim and Andy had caught him off his guard and infiltrated their fifth column of spontaneous enjoyment and made him wonder if his position was tenable at all.

‘That’s us second tap o’ the League,’ Jim said. ‘After that it’s the European Cup. We’ll take Real Madrid tae the cleaners. Scotia, the rickety cradle of soccer, will oncet again lead the van.’

‘Ah’ll have a penny poke of mixed metaphors, please.’
Andy said. ‘But we didn’t come here for to do wur roving reporter, did we now? Shall we tell the man?’

Jim volleyed his eyebrows up and down, pouting sexily.

‘We bring you news, O Master,’ Andy said solemnly.