Remedy is None (13 page)

‘Aw, it’s yerself, Charlie,’ he said. ‘Welcome tae the madhouse.’

‘That’s a sair oxter ye’ve got, John,’ Charlie said, chucking wee John on the cheek.

‘Aye. An’ sometimes Ah canny get sleepin’ for it at nights. Hang yer coat up there.’

The pegs, like everything else in the hall, were new. The house was a re-let and John was systematically obliterating the signs of former tenancy. He had finished decorating the hall and the living-room and was starting on the kitchen.

As they went into the living-room, Margaret shouted ‘Hullo’ from the kitchen. The room had that occupied air that the presence of a baby brings. Fender, chairs, and table were no more than improvised billets for the paraphernalia attendant on babyhood. Vests and a nightgown lay in neat array on the table. A pile of laundered nappies was on one
chair and on another, one nappy was laid out ready for use. Talcum and cream stood ready by the fire. A rubber mat lay on the hearth rug.

‘Just wait till Ah fit Bronco wi’ a silencer,’ John said, crossing to turn down the volume of the television. The horses galloped on in silence.

‘An’ how’s the Scarlet Pimpernel the night? Ye’ve been doin’ yer invisible man lately, right enough.’

‘Aye, Ah haven’t been about much,’ Charlie conceded.

‘About much? Ah thought we were goin’ tae have tae send out the police message. Whitehall 1212 stuff.’

John was preoccupied with completing the stripping of the baby that Charlie had interrupted. He laid him on the carpet and unpinned his nappy, averting his head from the contents.

‘Oh, son. Ye’ll need tae come fae a’ that. That’s inhuman. Ye’ll no’ make many friends that way. Ah’ve heard o’ B.O., but that’s goin’ too far.’

The baby lay unconcernedly while he was wiped. Then John started to hold him above his head, raising and lowering him while he gurgled regularly like a mechanical toy.

‘There he is. Look at ’im,’John said. ‘Five months an’ he hasn’t struck a blow yet. They say they’ve got nothing for ’im at the Broo. He’s still to say a word, too. Definitely backward. Spell “constipation”. Ye can’t, can ye? Well, if ye can’t spell it, what about getting it? Eh? Before the hoose gets condemned.’ A thread of saliva trailed from the baby’s mouth. ‘Ye can see the intelligence looking out ’im though, can’t ye? See the witty way he’s drooling at me there? Ye’ve got a great career ahead of ye, lad. Remember that. The sky’s the limit for you. You could be slaverer to royalty if ye put yer mind to it. Hup, 2, 3, 4. Hup, 2, 3, 4.’

Margaret came in carrying a large basin steaming faintly with hot water.

‘Stop it, John,’ she said. ‘You’ll make ’im sick. An’ how’s Charlie? John. Ah’ve told ye already.’

She bustled out and back in again, bringing with her a yellow square of foam-rubber that she submerged in the basin.
Charlie realized how much she had changed since the baby was born. She had become much more defined as a person, had gained a new authority. The way she went about bathing John junior typified it.

‘Ye’re just in time for the big performance, Charlie,’ she said. ‘First house.’

She spread a towel on her knees, took the baby, and eased him into the water, cooing him into a sense of security. Conversation between John and Charlie was only incidental to the performance that was taking place in front of them. It had that natural rightness about it that makes people look at a flying bird or accord a few minutes’ silent homage to the running of a river. Margaret was no more than an elemental extension of the baby, her hands providing the protection he couldn’t yet give himself. He turned placidly this way and that in her grip, prismatically reflecting pleasure in whatever he was facing, the flames of the fire, his father, the edge of the basin, while the water was laved about him. Dry-docked on his mother’s lap, he lay like an apprentice Michelin man, radiating with wrinkles, while John supplied Margaret with the required articles in turn, muttering tersely as he did so.

‘Cream. Talcum. Nappy,’ he said dramatically. ‘Do you think the patient will live, Doctor? Look at it. Isn’t it fantastic the amount of care that’s lavished on the human bum? It’s no’ that it’s a braw thing, either. But that’s all weans are, when ye think of it. A pickle o’ flesh round two openings. Entrance and exit. It’s no’ a human bein’ we’ve got at a’, Margaret. It’s a one-way street for chuck.’

Margaret was unimpressed by John’s philosophical insight.

‘Never mind, son,’ she said. ‘It’s just yer daft daddy talking.’

Now that he was nappied and nightgowned, hunger came on him like a conditioned reflex. It started as a preliminary wail and was maturing into a howl by the time Margaret had taken the bottle from the fireside, tested the heat of the milk on her wrist, and plugged his mouth with it. The yell transmuted to a gurgle and the gradual lowering of his eyelids
registered his progress to satiety. In the silence that ensued, muffled voices could be heard from the television.

‘Ye might as well put that off, John,’ Margaret said. ‘There’s no’ much point in leavin’ it like that.’

‘Ah like tae get ma money’s worth,’John said. But he went over and switched it off.

‘He wid leave it on all night,’ Margaret explained to Charlie. ‘He forgets it’s burnin’ electricity. Because it’s rented, he likes tae get every penny out it. Ah don’t know why ye’ll no’ buy one outright, anyway.’

‘Ah’ve telt ye till Ah’m Prussian blue in the face, woman. But ye’ve just got nae grasp of economics. Any repairs needed are done right away. No charge. Any new model that comes on the market, Ah can get it. When colour television comes in, Ah just get them tae install it. It’s the best thing since bottled beer.’

It was an attitude that was typical of John. He was one of those people who like to surround themselves with very definite attitudes to everything, to whom manhood is a sort of masonic intimacy with practical things, discernible in the conviction with which you express yourself on the workings of a car or the way you talk about women. It could be recognized in revelatory flashes, code messages that could range from the telling of a joke to the stubbing of a cigarette, and it presupposed a common philosophy that knew what it was all about. John liked to feel that he knew the right way of everything, down to how to tie a parcel.

‘It’s no’ the same as it bein’ yer own,’ Margaret said. ‘Anyway, Ah’ll need tae get yer heir to his cot. If ye wid make yerself useful for once.’

Charlie sat feeling superfluous while Margaret put the baby to his bed and John cleared up in the living-room. Their simple reoccupation mermerized Charlie. They epitomized themselves. Everything had its place. This night, like every other, was a series of small things to be done. Their lives were limited to themselves and the house and the baby. They needed nothing else. The world was reduced to these
practical dimensions and nothing extraneous could come at them except via these routes. When Margaret came back, she lifted a pile of freshly washed clothes and excused herself to the kitchen to do her ironing. She was tactfully leaving John and Charlie free to talk. John came back in and closed the living-room door.

‘Did ye notice the hall, Charlie?’John asked, settling back down by the fire.

‘Aye, John. It’s very smart.’

‘Once Ah get the kitchen done, Ah can really get into the garden. There’s always something. No rest for the wicked.’

He was pretending not to relish it, but that was really what he wanted to have, a kind of Forth Bridge of trivial household tasks, so that by the time he got to the end it would be necessary to start at the beginning again. It was like knowing that he could never become redundant as a person. He was going to be needed here as far as he could foresee. It was a good, safe feeling.

Charlie gave him a cigarette.

‘Well then,’John said, giving him a light from a strip torn off a newspaper, a habit inherited from his father. 4 An’ when are ye goin’ back up to the uni., Charlie?’

‘Ah didn’t know Ah was,’ Charlie said.

‘Aw, don’t give us that, man. Can ye give me one reason why ye shouldn’t?’

Charlie could think of a coffinful. But they weren’t easy to articulate.

‘If it’s money,’John said, anticipating what to him was the most logical answer, ‘ye’ll surely get a bigger grant after whit’s happened. An’ ye could work spare time or something.’

‘Aye. Ah suppose Ah could.’

‘Well. What then?’

‘Ah’ve just got no urge to do it any more.’

‘Why no’, Charlie? Why no’?’

For Charlie the question metamorphosed into another.

‘What dae you think o’ ma feyther’s death, John?’

The question seemed somehow improper to the practical
little room. John saw how things were going. He remembered the scene at the graveside. He felt a bit embarrassed for Charlie. What did these things have to do with them?

‘For God’s sake, Charlie. Ah think it was sad. It was very sad. So what?’

‘But that’s all you think? Ah mean, it was just sad and that was it?’

‘What else is there?’

‘Ah don’t know, John. But it seems tae me there must be something. Ye can’t just leave it like this.’

‘How not? What else can ye do? Go into mourning for the rest of yer life? What is it with you anyway, Charlie? What’s getting you?’

‘Ah just can’t accept it, John. Ah can’t accept it.’

John reflected momentarily on the hazards of going to university and spending too much time just thinking. It had isolated Charlie from his family. John had felt it before. Now it was as tangible as a wall between them.

‘Ye just have to accept it,’John said. ‘That’s it. Everybody dies. What are you goin’ to do about it? Dae ye think ma feyther wants ye tae go about lamenting ’im all yer life? Listen . . .’

Charlie listened, having to remind himself that this was his brother talking. It was only a few years ago that they had slept in the same bed, sometimes talking on through the night until the sparrows twittered that it was dawn. There had been a time when their thoughts and ideas had been so close that they had spoken in a kind of conversational shorthand. They had told each other so much, had shared experiences, had talked of girls and feelings and ambitions. They had helped to make each other, piecing together the fragments of themselves. Through the long summer holidays of boyhood, in games and in the wild prophetic vauntings that punctuated them, they formed a brotherhood of their own that was more intense than Nature’s. At different stages of their development, the slight disparity in their ages had thrown their relationship out of joint. In childhood, Charlie had been only
an embarrassment to John’s freedom, like a tin can on a cat’s tail, a hindrance at his heels when he wanted to play football or climb trees, a parental fifth column betraying the daring of boyhood to his mother, a teller of weepy tales. And again in the early teens, John was already apprenticed to manhood when Charlie was still a collector of skinned knees and preposterous facts, and to whom girls were no more than inadequate boys. But growing up is a cyclic process, and at other times when John lapped Charlie and they travelled some way abreast, they would find their old affinities reaffirmed. In their late teens they seemed to come more closely together than ever and it was like the meeting of old friends who had lost touch with each other. They found the same dreams still existing in each other, purified of their wilder impossibilities, but still reaching for fulfilment. Each restocked his faith in himself from the other’s encouragement. The great things that they wanted were no clearer in outline, but much more imminent, and they were moving towards them together. Then almost casually, incidentally, it seemed, John had got married. And they lost any real contact with each other again.

Now as Charlie listened to him talking it seemed that they were just two people who had only this room in common. Not even this room. For Charlie didn’t belong here. This was John’s room. Not just in the furniture and the fittings, but in the certainty it represented, in the finality of shape it imparted to John. This was the very form John had imposed upon his life, the meaning he had given it. This was all the vague longings and the dreams, all the amorphous potential, actualized into a hard reality. He had found his own elusive grail. It was one that Charlie couldn’t share. It seemed to him a terrible anticlimax, wine that had turned to water. Were all the huge ambitions, the racking progress into manhood, only to culminate in this? Was this a man’s fulfilment? A steady job, a couple of mouths to feed, a wall to paint, a garden to dig, aimless talk to which death put an arbitrary period? Was this all there was to generate John’s absolute assurance?

For he was so assured. Listening to him talk, Charlie was conscious most of all of that. His tremendous assurance. He spoke on and on so glibly, demonstrating the pointlessness of dwelling on death, pointing out that no son was obligated to perpetuate the morbid memory of a father, referring to his own child to illustrate the point. This was the assurance Charlie had wanted to borrow from. But it wasn’t transferable. The peace John had made with things was a separate one and Charlie wasn’t included in its charter. It was acceptable only if you were John. Otherwise, you were on your own. It was not contained in a neat phrase or a single idea that you could take like a pill. It was an idiosyncratic gesture of character, a subtle secretion of the glands of personality.

Charlie felt again that he had been stupid to expect anything from this visit. There were certain things you couldn’t get from other people. You didn’t go to your neighbour and borrow a cup of quiescence. It was never the brand you needed. With that simple realization, the conversation ceased to matter. John’s voice continued in one dimension only, sound gutted of sense. It was not that Charlie disagreed with its conviction, but only that he was conscious of its reverse side, which was his own lack of certainty. All it meant to him was what he didn’t have.

‘Ah just wish Ah’d had your chance, Charlie. An’ the brains tae go along wi’ it. Don’t be daft. Ye only get a chance like this once. Don’t waste it. Go back up to the uni. An’ stick in. That’s what ma feyther wanted ye tae dae, anyway. Ye’ll regret it for the rest of yer days if ye pack in now. Ah mean, you drop it now an’ ye’re worse off than a tradesman. What are ye goin’ tae dae? Cairry the hod? Get a job as a labourer? Hump an’ carry? There’s a lotta years ahead, Charlie. Think about them. If ye don’t go tae university again, what’s the alternative? Think about that.’