Weekend (7 page)

‘People don’t know the half of it,’ he said. ‘My life’s not my own. Us linguistic paramedics have it hard. The language would grind to a halt if it wasn’t for us.’

She shifted slightly. The heavy movement of her breasts made radar contact with his loins.

‘So what is it?’ she said. ‘Emergency parsing?’

He stroked her arm.

‘What it is,’ he said, wishing he could think of something to sustain the levity. ‘I’ve got to deliver a mixed metaphor. Seems to be a tricky one. Sounds like a breech birth. The writer’s in agony. Coffee?’

‘That would be nice.’

She lay watching him as he got out of bed and put on his boxers. He was self-conscious before her eyes, hoping that what had been posing as a battering ram during the night hadn’t turned into a toothpick. He paused on his way out of the bedroom.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘How do you take it? The coffee, I mean.’

‘Black, no sugar.’

‘Interesting social inversion, isn’t it? I know how you take sex but not how you take coffee.’

‘Well,’ she said, smiling at him. ‘Some of the ways.’

‘There’s more?’

‘Hm.’

‘May I study long at the encyclopedia of your body.’

‘You certainly passed first grade,’ she said.

He saw his kitchen with a stranger’s eyes. It was a shambles. He found it hard to believe that such a small place could contain so much untidiness. Had she been in here last night? He wondered what could possibly have been the point of stacking these empty milk cartons neatly on the draining-board. He understood when he raised the lid of the bin and found it full to overflowing. He crumpled up the cartons and stuffed them ineffectually into the bin. The lid wouldn’t shut properly.

He turned around vaguely in the kitchen, wondering where to start, and saw that there was no way he could finish until he had a spare day to work with. To hell with it. Presumably she had found him out already. Caliban in his cave, living among the debris of his loneliness.

Boiling the water for the coffee, he remembered her name. She was called Mary Sue. She came from New York. He was troubled about something. Staring out of the window, he located it among the leaves of a sycamore tree outside, as surely as if it had been sitting there like a bird, watching him. That was it. He felt too much at ease with her too quickly. Hers was an effortlessly comfortable presence to be in. It was like having known each other already and they had just been waiting for circumstances to get round to introducing them, exchanging names.

The feeling was so strong that he was tempted not to go to Cannamore. That was ridiculous, surely. Decisiveness gelled with the coffee-grounds in the water. He was going, all right. Last night was fine. It was a sweet short story. Why try to turn it into a novel?

When he brought the coffee through, she was sitting in her bra and pants, freshening her makeup. He regretted that. He
liked the way she had wakened, with her eye-shadow lewdly wrecked. Courtesan was turning into housewife.

‘Is this all you want?’ he said.

She eyed him questioningly over her compact.

‘More is possible?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I could scrape the mould off some bread and toast it. Or there’s a chocolate biscuit through there we could break with an axe.’

‘I’ll forego the breakfast menu,’ she said, taking the coffee. ‘Thanks.’

‘You’ve obviously seen my kitchen.’

‘Only from the outside. I didn’t want to go in, in case something bit me. But this is lovely.’

‘Okay, smartass,’ he said, getting as close to Humphrey Bogart as he could. ‘You gonna push your luck too far.’

‘Hm. He speaks my language. Almost.’

‘You know I’ve got to go to this weekend thing?’

‘You told me last night.’

‘I did?’

‘Oh, yes. And many other things.’

He waited, wondering what the other things were. She didn’t say. He decided to dress potential embarrassment in more levity.

‘I hope I didn’t mention the three murders I committed?’

‘Three? You only mentioned two. But you can tell me about the other one next time. If there is a next time?’

‘Yes, please.’

He left it at that. By the time he was shaved and dressed and had packed his travelling-bag, she was sitting demurely on the bed, which she had made, finishing her coffee. He checked that his notes were in the bag, then remembered the short story Mickey Deans had given him. He packed the two copies
of it with a certain trepidation. He still didn’t know what he was going to say about it. He put his jacket on.

‘Can I drop you?’ he said.

Her eyes widened as she looked at him.

‘Somewhere,’ he said, spreading his hands. ‘In a taxi.’

She smiled. That smile could become addictive, he thought.

‘You afraid I’ll ransack the house if you leave me here alone?’

‘Anything you take will be doing me a favour. It’s mostly stuff I can’t be bothered to throw out. I’m just trying to be polite.’

‘After last night, why bother?’

He laughed.

‘Okay. I’ve ordered a taxi. I have to go now. I’ll be happy to drop you at your place if you want. If not, stay here the weekend. My dumpster is your dumpster.’

‘I’ll leave with you,’ she said.

‘You want my number?’

‘I have it.’

‘You’re some machine.’

The taxi sounded its horn and he gestured that he would follow her. At the bottom of the stairs she picked up the mail and passed it to him.

‘Three letters,’ she said. ‘Impressive.’

‘A thin day, my dear,’ he said pompously.

He noted that one was from a publisher. It had a red square on the front advertising a new novel. Surely they wouldn’t have the insensitivity to do that if they were rejecting
his
novel. He knew the thought was nonsense but he indulged it the way he had indulged himself long ago in avoiding stepping on the cracks in the pavement before an exam. He didn’t know who the other two letters were from. One had a typed
address. The other was handwritten in impeccable script. He put all three in his inside pocket.
Poste restante
. To be left until called for. He decided to try not to open any of them till the weekend was over. If he could fulfil that promise to himself, he decided, the news would be good.

Two

One of the problems nowadays with Stevenson’s
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
– Andrew Lawson was saying in his not unattractively portentous voice – is that it is familiar to us before we have read it. Mr Hyde has become a cliché of antisocial behaviour. Everybody knows one. Like Don Quixote or Hamlet, he has entered popular culture by a kind of osmosis. We feel we know him before we ever meet him. It is hard to come at him fresh. We may lessen the impact of the book because of the flabby assumptions we bring to it. But try to imagine the shock of his sudden appearance in Victorian society.

Open-mouthed, Marion pushed the pause button on her tape-recorder, as if enacting the shock Andrew Lawson was talking about. Someone was trying the door of her room. She was sure she had seen the handle turn. She thought she might also have heard the infinitesimal, flat click of a lock refusing to yield.

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her pyjamas with
the lights out. The moonlight that infiltrated the thin curtains made a daguerreotype of the room. The impression had been pleasing to her, as if she were sitting inside a nineteenth-century photograph, had re-entered the time in which this building was conceived. She had been imagining the ghosts of old inhabitants wandering the corridors, while the deep voice on the tape seemed to be talking of an era when they would have done so in the flesh. It had been an eerie feeling.

Suddenly, imagined eeriness had become real, and with it her fear. She had been gazing abstractedly at the door, listening to the hypnotic sound, when the handle had turned. Her finger had pressed automatically on the machine, erasing the voice as if it had been a medium calling up dead spirits.

Holding her breath, she continued to stare at the handle. It turned again. She managed not to call out. She forced herself to go on staring at the door-handle. Very slowly, nothing happened.

She looked at her watch. 2.15. Well into Sunday. She wondered who could be trying her door at this time. If it had been Vikki, she would surely have knocked. There was no one she could think of. There was no reason she could think of. She laid the tape-recorder on the bed and very quietly crossed towards the door, wincing at the creaking moan a floorboard made under the carpet, like the sound of the past buried in modernity but not yet dead. Crouched at the door, she listened. The only thing to disturb her was her breathing.

Very carefully she tried to release the lock, her tongue sticking out as if the elaborate expression of a dread might forestall its consequences. The lock clicked softly, reverberating like a rifle shot in her head. She clenched the handle, leaning instantly against the door to withstand any sudden pressure from the other side. She turned the handle slowly.
She pulled the door open. There was nothing in front of her but blank wall.

It was a nondescript off-white, she noticed. The thought was like common sense returning. She put her head out, looked left and right: carpeted corridor and dim, dead light. She was about to shut the door again when she sensed that something wasn’t as it should be. She put her head back out and looked left. Two rooms along, on the opposite wall of the corridor, the door was open – an oblong of darkness where polished wood should be. Beside the open door, sitting on the carpet against the wall, there was what looked like a toilet bag. Was that the room from which she had heard shouting earlier and had been too frightened to come out? The noise had been so violent, she wondered what could have happened.

She stepped out into the corridor and listened. No sound came from the darkened room. She tiptoed towards it on her bare feet. She stopped and craned round the door jamb.

She thought at first she really was seeing a ghost. The motionless figure of a woman sat with its back towards her. She was facing a window with open curtains, against which the moonlight sharpened her outline. Beyond her the sea was turgid.

‘Excuse me,’ Marion said.

The woman remained motionless.

‘Excuse me!’

The woman’s head turned slightly to the left but it was her only movement. She said nothing. Her head turned back towards the sea.

Marion walked into the room, feeling embarrassed to be in her pyjamas but unable simply to walk away. When she stood beside the woman, Marion paused, transfixed by her utter self-absorption.

She sat like a woman in the waiting-room of a railway station where no trains came any more. She seemed dressed to travel but unable to move. Her cashmere coat was buttoned. A small travelling-bag lay on the floor beside her. There were some objects on the table in front of her. The only one Marion identified clearly was a small coolbag. The woman was staring through the windows at the moonlight on the sea. She was as bleak an image as Marion could remember seeing. Marion followed the woman’s eyes out into the darkness. Diseased and deadening pallor on the waters and the land. It was as if, Marion thought, the night was painting her mood. The world had leprosy.

‘Are you all right?’

The woman turned almost towards Marion without confronting her directly. Her face was cadaverous in the moonlight. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I wouldn’t think so.’

‘Can I do something for you?’

The woman shook her head.

‘You see, you left your door open.’

The woman had an expression vague enough to suggest that she didn’t know doors could be closed, and turned again towards the window.

‘Shall I close it for you?’

‘If you like.’

Marion felt reluctant to leave but the woman was watching the sea again.

‘Who are you?’ Marion said. Once she had expressed it, the question seemed slightly impertinent. It had surfaced automatically because she couldn’t identify the woman as a
member of the study group. The woman thought about it for a moment.

‘Sandra,’ she said. Something like a smile that died in embryo happened in her face. ‘I think.’

Marion smiled too but the woman didn’t notice.

‘I’ll close the door then, shall I?’

Marion went out and closed the door. Back in her own room, she turned the lock again. If Vikki decided to come back now, that was her problem. She went and sat on the bed among her notes. She wondered what the woman was doing there. She didn’t know whose room it was or if it had been occupied until tonight. She lifted her tape-recorder.

She was glad Andrew Lawson had given her permission to tape all the lectures. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight and the tape gave her something to distract her from herself. She would make notes of the parts that had interested her. It would take her mind off the embarrassment. How could she have done what she did this evening? Perhaps that was why someone had tried her door. Maybe they imagined she was available. The thought would have been laughable last night. No doubt it was still laughable but she didn’t find it as easy to be amused now.

She looked at the tape-recorder. She was almost at the part about the names, the part she had found most interesting. She pressed the button.

Perhaps one of the most striking things about the novel is the scarcity of event. What does Hyde actually do on all those occasions when he escapes from the body of Jekyll? It’s very
vague. Of course, Victorian convention would forbid too many details. Perhaps that’s why a Hollywood version of the novel introduced Ingrid Bergman to proceedings. But Stevenson turned this limitation to his advantage. There is a story of Michelangelo confronting the marble from which he would carve the statue of David. Someone had started to work on it before him and had lost his nerve. But not before he had cut a large piece from it. The story is that Michelangelo contrived to conjure the damaged marble into the posture of David’s body. He made a virtue of necessity. Stevenson does something similar. Obliged to work with an enforced reticence, he induces us to inform the silence with our own imagination. We fill the void with ourselves. And isn’t that what we try to do with our own lives?