The Glasgow Coma Scale (26 page)

Blushing fiercely, Scott Flint said, as if they were competing for the most inappropriate thing to say to one another: ‘Of course, if it’d been up to me, I’d have sent him on his way with a kick in the pants.’

She laughed, then worried it might have sounded unkind. But he was so perjinct in his neat blazer, a Remembrance Day poppy still in the buttonhole, and he sounded like a little boy swearing to defend her honour. After a moment he gave a self-effacing chuckle too. ‘It’s been good to put a face to the voice at last. You won’t remember, but I did your telephone interview? When you got the promotion?’

‘Oh. No, I remember. Oh,’ she said again, starting to smile, ‘so it’s all your fault?’

What she remembered of that call was a quailing voice, more nervous even than Lynne, it seemed, and how it had made her picture someone more insipid than he’d proved to be. Less physical. In reality he was rather stocky, with a rufous beard and dark hair, also neat, cropped so close it seemed moulded to his head. His face was what you might call pleasantly ugly. Why was it that when you met such a person, even when he was nicer than you’d envisaged, you slightly resented his failure to match the image you’d concocted?

Pleasantly ugly, that was harsh. Normal. Even nice-looking.

Every light on Great Western Road was against them, and at each junction they sat unspeaking, Scott riding the clutch, making the car toil on the spot in seeming frustration. When the lights changed, the car surged forward for a moment before the traffic refroze. Horns sounded. He smiled at her in apology, and a slow worry punctured Lynne’s contentment. These friendly questions, these smiles. Had he sought to prolong the journey, deliberately selected the slow route home? Was she undertaking, unawares, a covert follow-up interview?

By way of experiment, she tried a bland, non-work-related question: ‘Do you come down to Glasgow often?’

‘Not as often as I’d like. My sister stays in Partick, and a few uni friends live here still. So once in a while. Actually,’ he added, a little breathlessly, ‘I’ve a friend getting married tomorrow, so I’m down for the whole weekend’ – then fell silent, hushed himself.

On the radio, the strings of some chamber piece had worked themselves up to a frantic pitch, and Scott turned the volume right down, clicking his tongue in disapproval. ‘Too much,’ he said, smiling at her again. She was increasingly certain. A man and a woman, in a car, in the rain: what other reason could there be? Maybe this was what Angus had meant about it being important to keep your eyes open and mouth shut, compiling the various bits and flecks of information that came in – assemble the whole pattern first. Something was condensing in the air. Any minute now, Scott might voice the question he’d been preparing ever since she’d accepted the lift, a prospect that alarmed Lynne – not the question itself, but how she might answer, and what she might be caught up in if she responded, as she might do once more, as events were making her want to, spontaneously, recklessly.

‘You know,’ she said, as the Botanic Gardens’ dim-lit onion domes at last came into view, ‘you could drop me here, if you like, and I can walk the rest. If there’s been an accident it’ll be backed up all the way to Kelv—to Maryhill.’

As she had expected, he demurred. ‘It’s no trouble – I’ll have to go as far as Byres Road anyway to get to my sister’s. I’m sure I can get you a little closer . . .’

‘No, no.’ An additional dismal scenario occurred to her: his car pulling in to Glendower Street, beside the little minimart on the corner, Scott’s face grotesque in the lights shining through the shop-window decals of pizza slices and apples beaded with glycerine dew; the question he’d ask – all observed from a second-floor flat by a figure in silhouette, a bearded face pressed to the bay window’s cold glass. ‘I think the rain’s starting to ease off a bit, anyway,’ she lied bare facedly. ‘Look – you could stop here, by the chip shop.’

‘Here? Well, if you’re sure?’ He brought the car in, sitting in what seemed to Lynne an agitated silence as she slipped her shoes back on and took her handbag from the footwell.

‘God, this weather. I hope it clears up for your wedding tomorrow – is it tomorrow?’

‘That’s right. Though it’s not my wedding.’ She’d deliberately waylaid him, and felt he must sense it too, but found herself tarrying, feigning a search for her keys, wondering what exactly the offer had been, what she’d have been refusing. She was waiting for a word, a hand on her leg – surely not that? He had the air of someone to whom the idea could never occur.

‘Well, enjoy it. Try not to – what was it, kick anyone in the pants?’ She opened the door and rain gusted in on her. ‘Thank you for the lift and . . . everything else.’

‘You too,’ he said, nonsensically. ‘Stick your head out that birdcage you mentioned, eh? Go for a wee scowp about.’

It was brinkmanship – his prisoner’s dilemma again. Leave it too long to say anything, waiting for the other person to compromise himself, and both lose out. But maybe she had misread him, because Lynne was able to get out the car and slam the door with no further word from Scott, without him following her on the dash to the chip shop’s awning. She waved at the car, couldn’t see if he’d returned the wave.

She’d been so sure he’d wanted to say something. ‘Ah, well,’ she said aloud to herself, wishing she had thought to put an umbrella in her bag that morning. All she could do was wait out the rain. Meantime, though, her hunger, a weight with sharp corners, had been improbably intensified by the smell of grease and fat and salt she usually found disgusting. What was in the fridge at home? Salmon steaks, pre-mixed stir-fry. She turned, looking through the blue neon waves tracking one another endlessly across the chippie window, and thought about silken fish flesh in its crust of batter, too hot to eat at first, so you picked instead at the gummy chips slathered in salt and brine, as grease soaked the brown paper translucent. Reckless, she could be reckless. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d had a fish supper on a Friday night.

Lynne was unfamiliar with the South Side, and when she arrived at Maitlandfield House she was already running late. The day was too warm for February, and she was dressed all wrong, a cardigan over her dress; the walk from the train station had taken twenty minutes, all uphill, and she felt dishevelled and conspired against. She should have brought the car, but had worried that on seeing it, Angus might, like a pet in kennels, think she had come to take him home.

She gave her name at the gatehouse, was allowed entry, and set off up the long red-gravelled driveway towards the house. Spring had come early, but seemed peculiarly advanced here: the trees that lined the drive were brilliant with soft new foliage; beneath them, in the grass verges, daffodils were almost in bloom. The feeling she had – and this must have been the intention of those in charge – was less of entering a new place than of leaving a former one behind.

Maitlandfield, a sandstone mansion with a colonnaded entranceway, had been first a private residence, then a school, before the charity acquired it. As she approached, Lynne noticed an ugly new conservatory huddled to the house’s east side, which the photographs in the brochure had been careful to conceal. Within it, residents – was that the word? – sat in wicker chairs, and as she’d feared, it was games of whist, tea from a bottomless samovar, a television turned permanently to talk shows.

The entrance was on the far face of the house. It was a mid-sized room unostentatiously decorated, somewhere between a hospital reception and a hotel foyer: friendliness designed by committee. On the wall behind the front desk hung a large daubed painting, an autistic landscape, and there was an overpowering floral smell, seemingly from a vase of stargazer lilies on a table nearby. Elsewhere Lynne saw posters for courses, classes, non-denominational prayer sessions; the same picture of a kitten struggling to grip on to a tree branch as someone had stuck on a wall at Arundel. Beneath this, a laminated sign cautioned:
ABSOLUTELY NO ALCOHOL TO BE ADMITTED
. She gave Angus’s name, this time, to the rather severe girl behind the desk, and signed the visitors’ book. Then, rather than setting off immediately towards the residents’ rooms as directed, she hung back. ‘I just wondered . . . How is he? Mr Rennie. Is he all right?’

In an instant, the receptionist’s frosty efficiency evaporated. ‘Oh,’ she stammered, clutching up a tidy stack of papers from behind the desk to disarray then set neat again. Poor girl: Angus probably didn’t know she even existed. ‘Oh, well, it does take some people a while to adjust. He’s definitely making progress, though,’ she added, too late: Lynne’s smile, pitying to start with, had already ebbed to nothing.

She could leave now: no one would blame her. Hardly anyone would even know. But she would, and so she forced herself on down the hallway towards the residents’ rooms. Here the smell was that of freshly laid carpet, pleasantly acrid – though, like the pungent scent in reception, it made her wonder what necessitated such strenuous indicators of freshness, cleanliness. Through windows on her left she looked on to a walled garden where some residents sat in deckchairs, keeping to the shade, seemingly unnerved by the weather. To her right ran a series of doors, each with a name plate: a polythene file pocket containing a sheet of paper with the resident’s name printed in cursive type, most of these signs further personalized with drawings, stickers, photographs.

The sign with Angus’s name was otherwise unadorned. His door stood ajar, and Lynne, finding no solace in the thought that she might yet escape without his ever knowing she’d planned to visit, peeped in through the gap. The receptionist’s ambivalence about his progress had made Lynne fear what she might find, and it was a relief to see him looking more or less as she remembered him. He lay on the bed, flicking through a small red book. He was wearing stonewashed jeans and a plain white shirt, nothing like she would have picked for him. He had new, thick-rimmed glasses, and his beard, that thicket, was neatly shaped: a novelty. The glitter of grey hair seemed to have been eliminated from it, and although she was probably misremembering, she had the distinct impression that both his hair and skin had grown darker, healthier, since his Glendower Street days.

Hearing someone approaching from the far end of the corridor, cutting off her escape route, Lynne tapped once on the door and pushed it open. ‘Hi, Angus.’

‘Hi yirsel,’ he returned genially, not yet lifting his eyes from his book. When he did, his expression moved swiftly from suspicion to recognition to open surprise. He sprang up, spraddling the book face down on the bed. ‘Oh, Lynne! Come in, come in!’

They met in the centre of the room, performing there an inelegant dance, arms opening stiltedly for hugs, then dropping, both of them uncertain, until Angus tutted, ‘Och, Lynne, c’mere,’ and they embraced. With no resentment she could detect, he said: ‘Ah wis startin tae think ye’d nivver come by! How the devil ur ye?’

She broke the hug – though it was good and substantial, and she had missed it – as soon as seemed polite. ‘Oh yes, good, I’m good. And you – you look well.’

‘I am well,’ he agreed, all jaunty.

‘New glasses.’

‘Are they?’ He mugged going cross-eyed, trying to see them for himself. ‘Aye – no bad for NHS efforts anyway, eh?’

‘Make you younger,’ Lynne suggested.

‘Oh, ah’m no that, but.’

The walls were painted yellow, and the furnishings were modest: a desk and chair, a self-assembly wardrobe, even a small fridge, which gave off an inordinately loud humming. On a shelf over the fridge, a kettle and two mugs were arranged on a cloth doily presumably provided, like the white goods, by Maitlandfield. The alternative – the notion of Angus going out to purchase such a thing – made Lynne smile, at least until it occurred to her that maybe he wasn’t allowed to go out to buy things.

The room was a generous size, yet Angus seemed to occupy more space in it than he ought: wherever she moved, she seemed to be pressed into one corner or another, or to be vying to get into his arms for another hug.

He clicked the kettle on. ‘Please, Lynne, grab a seat. There’s the chair there, or you can sit on the bed wi me.’ He smiled. ‘If that’s no too forward?’

Choosing the bed, to show she was unfazed, she took off her cardigan, folding it on her lap. Angus opted first to watch the water starting to effervesce through the kettle’s transparent side, then to fuss with pushing back his cuticles. Anything rather than have a conversation? Engrossed in these tasks, though, he didn’t stop grinning. Hard to believe this was the same man who’d sat on the sofa in Glendower Street on the first of December with his eyes fixed on the TV while she carried his scant belongings down to her car. He’d refused to help with, or even acknowledge, what she was doing – denial personified, as if engaged in non-violent resistance. Between this and the changes in his appearance, Lynne was starting to feel there must have been a mistake: this was just Angus’s namesake, his benevolent doppelgänger. Or maybe, she allowed herself to think, she had actually, inadvertently, in sending him here, done the right thing.

‘Cannae mind how ye take it,’ he apologized, pouring the tea. ‘A splash milk, wis it?’

She nodded. ‘This is kind of you.’

‘Nuh-uh.’ He refused the compliment, still smiling. ‘Ah’ll grant you mibbe ah used tae be older. But nivver kind.’

What was this pantomime? She supposed he was enjoying the role reversal – her being his guest now. Watching him bumble around with the tea, Lynne was keenly aware of the crease he’d once made in her heart, even if it didn’t quite fold along that line any more. What she felt was milder than nostalgia – more a fondness for the self that had been so stricken over him, like a middle-aged woman might recall with forbearance her teenage years as some pop band’s lovestruck groupie. If questioned, of course, she wouldn’t have dared describe what she felt for Angus, now or at any point, as love.

As Angus hooked his foot around the chair leg and dragged it towards the bed to put drinks on, a greying man in a greying sweater slowed past the open door, saluting. ‘Andiamo!’ Angus called to him. ‘Andy Andy Andy! How’s it gaun, big man?’ In reply, Andy looked from Angus to Lynne and back again, then, grinning, friendly, raised his hands and made throttling motions around empty air. ‘Jist you hang in there, big man. Sumdy’ll be along tae visit you soon an aw.’ When Andy had moved on, Angus set down the tea tray – kittens, naïvely painted – and shook his head. ‘Naebdy’s comin tae see that sad dobber any time soon.’ Lynne noticed the faintest tremor on the surface of the teas, wondered if this trembling, like his odd buoyancy, might be chemically induced.