A Gift from Nessus Read online

  Morton wondered about it as he took the file from her. He thought there was a secret submissiveness about her that only needed the right password. But he hadn’t time to play at Ali Babas just now. He opened the file.

  ‘Tidy up a bit in here, Annette, will you? There’s a good girl. It needs a woman’s touch.’

  He wondered at once why he had said that. Certainly not because he wanted the office tidied. The simple statement, emerging without apparent reason, added a new dimension to the atmosphere in the room. Annette obeyed without comment, going through a ritual of shifting things about on his desk. Morton felt as if he had made a remark in code, the true significance of which only the two of them could have understood.

  Cameron’s file. Graph of one man’s deterioration. As the sales figures degenerated, the expenses increased, as if Cameron could compensate imaginatively for the shortcomings of reality. Morton shook his head. There was only one conclusion to be reached.

  ‘All right to put this stuff in the basket?’ Annette asked.

  ‘What’s that?’

  She came round beside him and held the papers in front of him while he riffled through them. He was more conscious of the fine white hairs on her arm than of the writing on the papers. The shape of her bosom affected him like an astigmatism.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, not sure himself whether he was passing judgment on the contents of the papers or the contents of Annette’s blouse, and he watched her cross to the wastebasket.

  There was only one conclusion to be reached. He couldn’t help wondering about Annette, though.

  ‘These ones here, Annette. Put them in the left-hand drawer.’

  Although he wasn’t in her way, he made a show of moving to let her pass, settling nearer to her than he had been. She was in no hurry to move away, tapping the edges of the sheets of paper on the desk-top.

  ‘A second,’ while his hand rested on her forearm. In leaning over to see the top sheet, he felt her hair brush his cheek. Her skin against the blouse sighed infinitesimally, as if deputizing for an emotion. His fingers made a small gesture of contraction on her arm. ‘Yes. They’re the ones,’ leaving pale fingermarks like a rubber-stamp on her flesh.

  Only one conclusion to be reached, his mind repeated to him like a patient secretary. But duty came to him as his mother’s voice had through countless dusks when he had been involved in timeless games, distant and unreal. This was becoming an absorbing game. Annette, with the drawer closed, wasn’t so much standing as hanging, marionette on loose threads.

  ‘You could empty the ashtray if you’ve time.’

  It was so ridiculous he almost laughed, but she did it. For a manic moment, he had a wild spatial sense that this room had broken off from everything else, was spinning in a private orbit, surrounded by eternal fog. Even more absurd requests were improvising themselves in his head. Brush my shoes. Stand on your head in the corner. He decided to halt on the verge of megalomania. He might just be suffering from overwork. After all, what signs had she given? Also, there was an uneasy ambiguity about who was the ringmaster in this subtle circus. He wasn’t sure whether he held the whip or responded to it, for he couldn’t take his eyes off her. One thing he hated was to let other people get the upper hand. This was enough for one performance.

  ‘All right, Annette,’ he said. ‘Thanks. You can knock off now.’

  ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr Morton.’ She invested the words with a lot of weight, like a walk-on actress trying to make her name on the strength of a line. ‘Goodbye,’ pouting on the plosive, as if she was extinguishing a delicate candle.

  ’Night,’ Morton called, the unnecessary volume of his voice seeming to intimate the distance she should have been from him. But his mind noted her departing buttocks like a memorandum.

  Only one conclusion to be reached. He glanced at the file again. It was ludicrously obvious that Cameron was at it. A fiddle was one thing, but this lot amounted to an orchestra. Morton didn’t want to do anything too drastic. For old time’s sake, he thought. And other things. But there was this additional information. Margaret Sutton. You couldn’t expect to run a mistress on expenses. No. Steps would have to be taken.

  Morton flipped the file shut and locked it in the right-hand drawer of his desk. Having decided to act, he felt better. It was now only a question of how, and Morton was good at the mechanics of a situation. He lit a cigarette. He was seeing Cameron tonight. But their wives would be there, as well as Jim Forbes and his wife. (Morton’s mind donated a smile like a penny to the image the name of Forbes always called up to him.) He decided he would merely mention to Cameron that he wanted to see him in his office first thing in the morning. Give him some doubt to sip on overnight, like black coffee.

  Morton stood as still as bronze in the middle of the office and listened. He relished this moment of soft limbo when the office-building ceased to be a factory of noises and addressed itself to murmured sounds, muted as prayers. The clank of a pail, melted by distance to a coin of sound dropped into a large silence; the closing of a door, a small hardness that healed in a second; footsteps like a message in morse; the preoccupied moan of the lift complaining to itself; all sounds that were movingly self-absorbed, confined to the confessional of their private purpose. In the glare of his small linoleum sanctum, Morton smiled self-sufficiently and to himself, graven out of his own preoccupations, wreathing smoke down his nostrils like a lonely bull that manufactures its own incense.

  The small cubicle adjoining his office contained a wash-hand-basin and a rack where his coat and hat hung. He washed his hands slowly and the question of how Allison Cameron would react if she knew became involved with the suds. He kneaded the issue to the point of her forced moral indignation and then washed it down the sink.

  At the door of the office, he paused with his coat on, looking round. All was in order. The office looked small with familiarity and Morton felt he had all but outgrown it. He noted in the general drabness the small prophetic pockets of luxury – oriental letter-opener, expensive desk-lighter. London was next. The future lay like tracks towards it. Suddenly Cameron clicked in his mind like a signal standing against him. Morton resolved in that second that Cameron would give neither him nor the company one more day’s trouble. He would bring him out into the open. Softly, wisping up out of dim Glasgow backstreets where children stuck like flies to a lamp-post that dropped a grey bell of light over them, threaded with memories of endless games of tig and scuffed shoes and tin-can football and snot-hardened jersey-cuffs, came the words of a game they used to play: ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are, the game’s abogey’. Morton nodded in answer to their echo, closing the door.

  3

  Although the fog might have seemed an adequate safeguard in itself, Cameron adhered scrupulously to the complicated rules he had evolved for visiting Margaret’s flat. This evening, as always, he parked the car a couple of streets away from where Margaret lived, but not in the same place as he had left it the time before. He had four habitual parking spots and he permutated them moodily. Having locked the car, he went in the opposite direction from his destination.

  It was a compulsive performance with him and, like most rites, was not quite rational. The dread of leaving the car two nights running in the one place had the strength of a taboo over him, as if such carelessness would bring discovery inevitably upon him. And the erratic course he took towards Margaret’s flat was not designed simply to foil the rubber soles of followers or elude the eyes of passers-by. For him it had almost the power of a spell, woven by his own feet, and proof against more than mere people. It was as if by pacing out a deliberately devious route he could shake off his sense of guilt, give his own conscience the slip, and create a charmed context for his meeting with Margaret, a private room that excluded the fears that scuttled in the cupboards of his mind, the shame that snuffled to get at him in his sleep. This evening especially he needed such a secret place to be, a shelter from drab realities.

  The fog did its bes
t to countermand the hardness of the truth, touching the gaunt dullness of the buildings with a brief, grey mystery. Cameron was glad of it, although he knew what lay beneath it well enough. This part of Glasgow was tucked and folded in his heart like a map of himself. Since he had known Margaret, it had taken hold of him with that relentlessness places have. Pointless images from it formed insistent lumber in his memory – the house in the corner sporting the potted plant whose leaves reached wanly after growth that never came; the newsagent’s window where handwritten postcards advertising rooms made illegible offers in the rain. That grubby plexus of streets formed a knot that tied him somehow to himself, meant more than masonry, so that sometimes in a dream he was running down one of those streets away from something, but found that one street doubled back endlessly into another, while around him rose the familiar tall black buildings where the starlings alighted to defecate in cheeky insult to the architecture.

  But tonight the fog helped him to generate the atmosphere he wanted, neutralising time and place. He was amoeba swimming through a grey infinity. For the time that he was with Margaret, there would only be two people in a room and nothing else would matter. Someone lurched past him greyly, drowning in his own dream.

  The light in the entry burned stale on the dank walls. As soon as Cameron’s foot clanged on the cold stone floor, the small dream he was nurturing died on him. This dim corridor admitted no deviation from the fact itself, led to nothing more than the bleak stairway at the end of it. On the two doors he passed, unknown names were dissolving in polished brass.

  Margaret lived in one of the top flats, three storeys up. The stairs had been hollowed down the middle by a river of feet, and greasespots showed here and there like domesticated bloodstains. Behind one of the doors as he went by, an argument raged faintly; the words, audible but incomprehensible, made small explosions of futility. He opened the door to Margaret’s flat with his key and went in.

  ‘Oh. Eddie. Hullo,’ she said.

  She was genuinely surprised to see him. Obviously she had assumed it was too late now for him to come today. There was a pile of jotters on the arm of her chair and she had a red pen in her hand, marking. She must have taken a very early tea. Cameron was embarrassed to see the tea-dishes still on the table and the fire not cleaned out, grey ash showing round the edges of the electric heater she had placed in the hearth. All that sloppiness was somehow like advertising her loneliness, seemed to be saying: See, nobody cares. She hadn’t even drawn the curtains.

  ‘I can’t wait long,’ Cameron said.

  At once he was angry with himself for saying that. It was unnecessarily brutal, so much more clumsy than the deft scene of mutual seduction that he had imagined. Margaret said nothing but her eyes were a reprimand he could hardly bear, like small wounds. Within himself he felt a response stir like a small haemorrhage, and the thing that bled in him was a complex tissue of shame and lust and hunger and pity.

  ‘I’ve just been doing some correction.’

  Margaret put the words between them like a screen until she could find herself, separate her thoughts from irregular French verbs. She stood up, gathered the jotters together and laid them on the floor beside her open briefcase.

  ‘The fog slowed me down a bit.’

  ‘Yes. It would. I think it’ll lift soon, though.’

  She was hesitant a moment in the middle of the room before she went to the window and drew the curtains. In taking off his jacket and hanging it over a chair, Cameron became vulnerable, like a tortoise without its shell. The white shirt-sleeves seemed ridiculous, a symbol of domesticity that was out of context here. The anonymity of the room swamped him. The bulb that hung from its fraying flex was shadeless, giving off the dull, cold light that seems to be stored in the waiting-rooms of railway stations. The whole place gave a sense of being in transit. Books were piled in several places, and two of them lay open, as if they had been abandoned by people in a hurry. On the arm of Margaret’s chair was a half-eaten biscuit. The wallpaper was ancient, and parts of its motif asserted themselves here and there, like graffiti.

  Cameron found himself wondering what he was doing in this room, and what he and this woman drawing curtains had in common. Margaret didn’t help to make the situation seem more natural. She crossed awkwardly from the window to the fireplace and became preoccupied in a contest with her own untidiness. She lifted an empty cup from the hearth and put it on the mantlepiece, as if that was where it belonged. She took the jotters from the chair and placed them neatly on the floor beside it. Trapped in her own chaos like a complicated chess problem, all she could do was shift the fragments of it around into different patterns, searching vaguely for some way out.

  The particles of her confusion seemed to settle like dust on Cameron, fouling his taste for this moment. He had an impulse to put his jacket back on and get out for good, leaving his key on the table, as if this room was a locker he had no further use for. It was hopeless for him too, he suddenly realised. He was like Margaret, forever pushing the refuse of his life from one place to another, as if it made a difference. He had been coming to this room for over a year now, and yet he felt it was pointless. Every time he turned his key in the lock, his own shame and self-deception fell out on him, smothering him. It was as if he kept his relationship with Margaret locked up in this room, like luggage he was always just about to use. But he hadn’t used it so far. He came back from time to time to check that it was still in the same place and still available to him. But he wasn’t sure he had the guts to take it any further. He wasn’t even sure he wanted to. Almost every morning, he woke into the same question: would he do it? Would he ever break with Allison and go to Margaret? Emotionally, he lived each day with his case packed in the hall. All he had to do was save enough resolution to buy a ticket. But it only needed Alice to cut her finger or Helen to touch his hand with questions, and he was robbed of resolution. It would be more honest just to leave now, and for good.

  But turning from the fireplace, Margaret showed him her face in familiar half-profile, the high forehead, the straight nose, the large mouth, the brown eyes that went opaque with secret thoughts, the dark hair in which even this light found veins of sudden amber. He inventoried her features painfully, like a clerk recording someone else’s wealth.

  ‘I wanted to come tonight,’ he said. ‘I had to see you.’

  It was spoken like a recrimination.

  ‘I’m glad you did.’

  ‘It’s been some day. What a day! Disaster day.’ He wanted to give all the tawdry weariness of it to her, as if she could expunge it.

  ‘I know what you mean. It’s been like that for me too. But you’ve salvaged some of it for me.’

  ‘You were going to do some work?’

  ‘That doesn’t matter. The past participles can wait. How long have you got?’

  ‘Not very long. I’m going out tonight. We’re going out. With friends. Damn them.’

  ‘At least you’re here.’

  ‘I wish I could stay.’

  ‘I wish you could.’

  A small hammer of blood tapped at Cameron’s temple. They stood in mute commiseration with each other, reluctant to give more. They had fed that demanding pain that grew out of their mutual presence, dropped a few words into it, and the jaws of it only widened. Taut and painfully dignified they waited for it to swallow them, transcending the little drabness of the place. Formally, solemnly, quietly, like someone articulating the first words of a ceremony, Cameron spoke.

  ‘I want you,’ he said and, walking over, flicked the switch, erasing the room.

  The place seemed to roar with darkness. They found themselves clumsily in the dark, their fingers relearning each other’s bodies in frantic braille. Unskilfully, Cameron released Margaret from her dress, patches of skin blooming palely. She keened slightly, the sound a minute descant to the muffled traffic of the city.

  ‘Love me, love me, love me,’ Margaret said, and the words swam weakly through her breathing. ‘Ta
ke me through, take me through.’

  They moved across the dark room like some impossible animal that had wandered out of prehistory. In the bedroom the curtains had not been drawn, and the fog washed on the window-pane, making the room seem to drift in a heaving void. Cameron felt angry at his clothes for shackling the urgency of his desire with the ludicrousness of trousers, the mundanity of laces. As he lay down beside Margaret, lust sprang her like a trap.

  ‘I wish there could be more,’ she was saying. ‘Why can’t we be together?’

  ‘I love you,’ offering the words as if they were some sort of absolution. Then he gagged her mouth with his.

  Beyond the moilings of their bodies, the city churned and hooted faintly like a factory, busily engaged in manufacturing their futures, making arrangements, constructing situations, precipitating choices. Again Margaret made to speak, but Cameron smothered her words, for her voice gave access to the needs that waited for him to finish, illumined the faces that watched him from the darkness of his own head. Allison, their children, Morton, the young man. Inexplicably, one irrelevant thought hovered over him like a vulture, waiting to glut on the guilt of his exhaustion: was this Allison’s day for going to Elmpark? He wondered if it was. He hoped it wasn’t. Somehow, that would make his action worse.