Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  For anything to be worth while, for all of their lives to have any meaning, there must be something more to connect those two images than casual trivia. Their lives were somehow insufficient. Something different was needed, something that would acknowledge what had happened and transform their trivial lives into an expression of it.

  Somehow, he did not know how, it had to happen. And it had to happen through him. For where else had his father’s suffering been registered except in himself? The mourners had come and gone, the obsequies were said and there had been no attempt to recognize the injustice his father had suffered. It might as well have been buried with him except that it had transmigrated to Charlie, now lived pent up in him as it had dwelt unrealized in his father. Only he could bring it into being.

  He felt himself vaguely dangerous with its potential. As yet he could form no intention. The feeling was too vast and amorphous to admit of anything as finite as an aim.

  He felt unknowingly that still desolation that each feels at some times in his life when he turns from pretending, evades the eyes of others and meets himself. It is as if you have passed through one of the strange concyclic circles of living, one of the secret doorways of the self, moss-grown with trivia so that the legend on the lintel is concealed and the chiselled enduring arch is hidden totally under the personal excrescences of your life so that you do not realize that this is a door through which all men must pass, a door made for all men to come to, mortared out of what all men are, and through which they may pass only one at a time. It may be much later before you realize that you are in a new place, have passed through many gates, and are come nearer to the final door behind which you wait with cup or knife to greet yourself. But from time to time in the press of hurrying intentions and talking friends and intermingling ambitions you glimpse yourself alone, fleshed in a private mystery, set out on a lonely road that none can travel with you. It is the same for all and different for each. In railway waiting-rooms, on late last buses, playing with their children, walking in the street, men find again the knowledge that was lost, hear news, come home to themselves alone. Commitments, demands, intentions, turn, grow, enfold, shut out the light, break suddenly and show, back-turned and deaf to your cries, the distant self, whose face you will only find at the final door. Voices of friend, brother, lover, call, here, there, near, far, this way, that, and suddenly fall silent. And you’re alone, where one footstep makes thunder in the dark.

  Chapter 7

  MRS WHITMORE GLIMPSED HERSELF IN THE FULL-LENGTH mirror as she passed. She paused automatically, making the ritual gestures of arranging her hair while at the same time being careful not to disturb its lacquered elegance. She noticed a wrinkle in her stocking that was like an omen of age. Putting down the small folder she was carrying, she eased up her dress, held it with her elbows, deftly damped her fingertips, and smoothed her left leg back to nylon youth. She shimmied her dress back into order, strafed herself with a last expert glance, and was about to turn away when she suddenly stopped, staring.

  Something about herself arrested her, something indefinable. It was a feeling comparable to knowing that there was something fractionally out of place in her appearance. But she knew that her make-up was immaculate, her clothes in good taste, her jewellery in keeping. Her eyes looked back at her, echoing their own question. Slowly, faced with herself, she came to face the feeling. It had been with her for some time now, prowling the edges of her consciousness, as if waiting for her to admit it. Doing her household duties, she had sensed its presence on the other side of each activity, and she had kept it at bay with preoccupation. But it haunted the small, still moments of her daily life like a patient ghost that longed to be incarnated. It constantly threatened to intrude more positively into her awareness. It was like something she had neglected to do or had mislaid, or like an unlatched window rattling quietly in the night. She might refuse to acknowledge it or to do anything about it, but she could not dismiss it.

  Now, sensing its imminence again, she wavered on the verge of trying to force it into consciousness, to see if she could exorcize the ghost by giving it flesh. But she was a little frightened of admitting it fully to herself because she knew that the substance of its shadow derived somehow from a lack in her life, and she dreaded the extent to which its acknowledgement might undermine her security. And yet, how could anything undermine her security? What was there that she lacked? She looked around the well-furnished bedroom, dwelling on the rich curtains, the plush carpet, the expensive furniture that reflected the light in polished patches. This was hers. And Peter’s. This was their house. A bungalow. Her mind inventoried its rooms smugly, emphasizing special features as if for an advertisement, refrigerator, stainless steel sink-unit, garage with room for two cars. She was very fortunate. Peter was good to her. What cause did she have to feel dissatisfied? One closed door away, Peter was sitting in the lounge, talking with Raymond and Eleanor, their guests. What was there to trouble her? Unless it was the past.

  She shied away from the thought. She had got over everything by now, she told herself. She had known that there were things she would miss terribly. She had known she would have to adjust. And she had adjusted. She had lived with herself for a long time by compromise, by a tacit and gentle self-deception, the studied exclusion of certain thoughts. She knew that you could only gain certain things by forfeiting others, that, where the achievement of one desire precluded another, you had to choose, that to possess was to relinquish. That had been her lesson, a hard lesson. Surely she had learned it by now. She had thought she had. She had tried, certainly. She owed Peter such an effort. It seemed unjust that old longings she had ascetically starved to death should resurrect their hunger in her heart. After so long. After so very long.

  Yet something of those longings had survived. She knew it had. She knew that what troubled her was a gap that remained from the past, a need that the years between had not fulfilled. They had been good enough years and they had brought everything she had hoped for, except their own self-sufficiency. She had hoped that her life with Peter would absorb her entirely, leave nothing of her over to be a prey to nostalgia or regret. There had been times when nostalgia had almost incapacitated her, like a recurring illness. Sometimes she had lived through a whole week in which every day seemed to focus exclusively on the past, and it was like being in a house which had windows at the back only. But she had learned to live with this, and she could cope with it when it came. She simply administered to herself gradually increasing doses of hard work and altruism until immunity had been re-established.

  But the feeling as it affected her now no longer responded to such treatment. Perhaps it was just that her complaint had reached its secondary stage. It was more tenacious than it had been, and it had assumed a subtly different nature. Before, she had recognized it simply as an intensified form of the nostalgia that becomes a part of all people as they grow older and the past begins to outweigh the future. She had thought of her own feeling as merely a highly particularized species of that general tendency, intenser for her because it was localized in one particular place and personalized into a few particular people. But now that no longer adequately accounted for it. Now it was not properly nostalgia at all. It was not a retrospective look at an irrecoverable past, something made poignant by the very fact of its being irredeemable. It was no longer content to have that pittance of time with which the present pensions off the past. It seemed determined to encroach upon the future. She had found herself lately seriously considering the possibility of making some sort of vague undefined contact with that part of her past that she had foresworn. Every time the realization of what she was doing came upon her she felt shocked at herself and determined not to do it again. What did she hope to gain from it? Even if she did reopen that door, what did she expect to find there that belonged to her? There was nothing for her there. She had seen to that. This was where she belonged. In this house with Peter. Everything that she had any right to was here. There was nothing
for her anywhere else. Then why was she not content? What was it that she wanted?

  ‘Jane! Have you gone to bed or something?’

  She started guiltily at Peter’s voice. She hastily checked her appearance again in the mirror, as if afraid her mental disarray might have a physical extension. Putting out the bedroom light, she went through to the living-room, donning a smile at the door.

  ‘I seem to have seen your face before,’ Raymond said. ‘We were nearly sending out a search-party for you there, Jane. You’d better take a compass next time.’

  ‘Were you developing the photographs?’ Peter’s voice was just this side of annoyance and no more.

  ‘Oh, the photographs!’ Her hands went up in surrender to his reproach.

  ‘Well, that was only what you went for, after all.’

  ‘You’d better check that room through there, Peter,’ Raymond said. ‘And make sure there’s not a lodger you don’t know about.’

  She went back through to the bedroom, mingling her laughter with that of the others to cover the furtive sense of guilt she felt. She tried to gear herself to their mood. This was where she belonged, she told herself again. She was going to enjoy this evening. But she couldn’t overcome a vague feeling of strangeness as she re-entered the living-room.

  ‘These had better be good after the time we’ve waited,’ Raymond said. ‘Malta, The Millionaire’s Playground. A Pictorial Account of a Holiday on the George Cross Island. Golden beaches . . . Dusky maidens . . .’

  ‘Here’s one of Peter when his skin was just beginning to peel,’ Mrs Whitmore said, passing the photograph to Eleanor.

  ‘Ooh. Frying tonight.’ Eleanor giggled. ‘Mind you, Peter, you really suit blisters.’

  ‘You mean blisters suit him,’ Raymond emended.

  ‘I mean exactly what I said,’ Eleanor persisted.

  ‘You can say it how you like. It’s no skin off my nose.’

  ‘It’s not until the skin begins to peel that you get the full savour of your sunburn,’ Peter continued, like a lecturer ignoring hecklers. ‘The blisters are only a sort of apprenticeship in agony. But once you get down to doing a striptease with your skin, you become a real veteran. It’s like a Gipsy Rose Lee that doesn’t know where to stop. You scratch and you scratch. And then you scratch. I could hardly wait for meals to finish so that I could go up to the room for my next performance. I used to invite Jane up to see my itchings.’

  ‘This is one of the harbour at Valletta,’ Mrs Whitmore said.

  They settled down to a relay of snapshots, with Mrs Whitmore providing explanatory captions and Peter using the incidents they recalled as launching pads for sardonic commentary on Malta.

  ‘It’s lovely scenery,’ Eleanor commented after some thought.

  ‘God, I wish I had said that,’ Raymond said, as he took the photograph from her. And went on at once, outrunning riposte, ‘Especially in the foreground there. Wow! Where do you book for this place? I thought Maltese women were supposed to be very prim. Concealing the tempting flesh and all that.’

  ‘Only the ones who’ve nothing to show,’ Peter said. ‘You do see some of them wearing long black dresses to go swimming right enough. Actually, they’re a lot worse than bathing-suits once they’ve been in the water. The way they sag and cling. Typical Maltese Irishness. It’s like the way you have to cover your upper arms in churches, isn’t it, Jane? No sleeveless dresses allowed. But it doesn’t matter how low the neckline is. Or how high you have the hemline.’

  ‘This was taken just coming into Gozo,’ Mrs Whitmore explained. ‘That’s the sister-island to Malta. It’s only half-an-hour in the boat. We spent two days there.’

  ‘Which was just about a day-and-a-half too much,’ Peter said. ‘It’s strictly a poor relation. They play up everything, show you round any old bit of rubble they’ve got handy. They just about give you guided tours of the public conveniences. Remember the prehistoric temple? A ring of boulders with weeds . . .’

  Mrs Whitmore was content to let him do the talking. It was all she could manage to take even a neutral factual part in the conversation. She found herself wondering what it had to do with Raymond and Eleanor. It was obvious that their interest was only token. They were more concerned with finding opportunities for needling each other. Why were they always like that? It wasn’t the first time she had been at a loss to understand why they were still together. Surely it would have been more honest for them just to separate. Yet she couldn’t help asking herself what right they had to inflict themselves on other people like this. On her. She felt a revulsion from them. What did she have in common with them? What was she doing sitting in their company?

  ‘You see, I was trying to get him to tell us the price of the taxi before I got in. But he just kept saying, “Rambla beach, sor. Lovely for swim. I take you Rambla. No bother money. Later. Later”.’

  She was aware of Raymond’s eyes on her legs. Like limpets. She didn’t bother trying to distract them or to cover her legs more effectively, nor to stare him into emabrrassment. He would probably have taken any acknowledgement of his attention, no matter what form it was in, as a secret victory. He was always furtively intruding on her in this way. Sometimes when he was speaking to her he would stare very deliberately at her breasts as if it were with them that he was communicating. At other times he would engineer careful accidents and casual collisions. Sitting in at table, he would unavoidably brush against her thigh, pressing hard with his hand just as he touched her. Looking at something over her shoulder, he would lean on a little, his hand imprinting itself on her back. He always seemed to position his chair in such a way that when he faced towards her, his face was averted from Peter’s. He didn’t seem to mind about Eleanor. He probably wanted her to notice. Mrs Whitmore had mentioned his behaviour to Peter, but because of Peter’s flippancy, she had not mentioned the subject to him again, for it hurt her too deeply. She was insulted that Raymond thought he could take these trivial and casual liberties with her, and she was ashamed when it occurred to her what grounds he might have for thinking so. That was something else left over from the past. The present was riddled with the past. How did she think she could get over it? It had left her on the defensive about herself, inclined to sift the most trivial attitudes and remarks for concealed implications. The sort of perfunctory masculine examination that most women would construe as a personal compliment, she would distort into a personal insult, while it was nearly always no more than an impersonal instinct.

  ‘And they were in process of building another one. They seemed to look on it as a sort of stake in heaven. And they had more churches than they knew what to do with already. Ludicrous. They’d rather have the sacrament than a bite of bread on the table. Building elaborate churches and some of them living in houses the size of outside toilets.’

  She wondered how Peter could be so content in their company. He seemed to be enjoying himself, relating his traveller’s tales. But then he liked an audience of any kind. He tended to adopt this cynical worldly-wise attitude to things when he was with them. They always seemed to bring out the worst in him. Listening to him, she could barely recognize the holiday. It was as if he had been with someone else. You would have thought it had been a penance to him. But it hadn’t been like that at all. The things he mentioned were true to a degree. But he was taking them out of their context, distorting perspective. He was presenting them with isolated fragments, taken from angles that exaggerated their dimensions, and were jaundiced with cynicism. She felt betrayed in some small way that alienated her even further from the others. It made her realize again with a sudden familiar hollow feeling just how loosely she was anchored to her present life even after all this time. It only took one of these distant supercilious moods of Peter’s to make her sense of security break its moorings and cast her adrift.

  ‘It took me some time to realize what was missing in all the rooms. Then it eventually got through to me. Fires. There wasn’t a fireplace in any of the houses we saw.�
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  ‘That would suit Raymond,’ Eleanor said. ‘He hasn’t quite mastered the art of getting one started yet. He uses newspapers, firelighters, and enough sticks for a Guy Fawkes bonfire. And he’s still down on his knees blowing like a bellows.’

  ‘How would you know about that?’ Raymond spoke in the same pseudo-jocular tone that Eleanor was using. ‘You’re never out your bed till it’s roaring up the chimney.’

  ‘Well, it gives me an excuse for having a long lie.’

  ‘You don’t need any excuse for that. Talking of fires, though. Have you heard the one about the minister with the four sons? I heard it in the office yesterday.’

  ‘All right, I’ll buy it,’ Peter said.

  ‘Minister has four sons. David, Peter, Paul and James. Are you sure you haven’t heard it now?’

  ‘Let’s all get down on our knees and plead with him,’ Eleanor exclaimed brightly.

  ‘No, but I hate getting told half-way through a joke that you’ve heard it. Or getting the punch-line stolen. Anyway. This minister has four sons. David, Peter, James and Paul. Three good ones. Follow in his footsteps. Become ministers. One prodigal. James. A right tearaway. Wine, women and song. Well, at breakfast this morning, the minister’s down first. So he’s standing in front of the fire. Warming his chorus and verse. Peter comes down next. “Good morning, Peter.” “Good morning, Father.” So Peter joins him, standing by the fire. Next one down is Paul. “Good morning, Paul.” “Good morning, Father.” And he joins the other two at the fire. That’s three ministers standing in front of the fire. Right? The next one to come is the fourth minister. James. So –’