Remedy is None

by William McIlvanney

  ‘Have you read any good palms lately?’ he asked in a tone of professional interest.

  The open hand she had been studying like a manual closed at the touch of his voice, became a clenched rebuff.

  ‘It’s chilly for June,’ he said. ‘We don’t seem tae get the summers we used tae get. Ah think it’s a’ these atomic bombs they’re dropping.’

  It was a device he used commonly when they were quarrelling and she stopped speaking. She liked that sort of burlesque of small-talk and generally thawed to a smile in the face of it. But this time she remained unaffected. Charlie took out his cigarettes and offered her one. He wanted to make her shift her position, even slightly, to infiltrate just a small fifth column of movement behind her composure and undermine it. When she had accepted a cigarette, he held the match poised over the matchbox but didn’t strike it, forcing her to give him at least a little of her attention.

  ‘Ah died just yesterday,’ he said. ‘Ah just thought Ah’d mention it, in case it was of any interest.’

  She stared doggedly at the match, but a muscle in her cheek twitched and the cigarette quivered fractionally in her lips, like a forked stick over water. Charlie divined laughter. He felt an almost childish delight in the thought that he could make her laugh and started to address some invisible companion over his shoulder.

  ‘Ah’ve been going about fur quite a while with this wee dummy lassie here,’ he said. ‘She can’t speak a word, ye ken. But Ah’ve learned the deaf-and-dummy alphabet from A to Z. It’s amazing how ye pick it up. Ah can talk away quite the thing to ’er.’

  He proceeded to give a demonstration; leaning avuncularly into Mary’s face. It was a digital extravaganza. His hand seemed to blossom with several extra fingers that assumed grotesque shapes and patterns that merged into a blur of movement, and all the time his mouth was benignly spelling out the verbal gloss, ‘If-it-takes-a-man-a-week-to-walk-a-fortnight-how-many-oranges-in-a-barrel-of-grapes?’ The cigarette was now bobbing frantically in her pursed lips and the swell of suppressed laughter was creasing the skin around her eyes. Charlie paused, happily triumphant, and struck the match. He made as if to offer it to Mary and then withdrew it. His other hand pointed like a painted direction-sign to her mouth.

  ‘Danger,’ he said. ‘Unexploded Laugh.’

  In that instant the cigarette fell like a stopper from her mouth on to the table and her laughter effervesced uncontrollably and Charlie was joining in, both of them suddenly laughing. And just as suddenly her breath seemed to catch and it was as if her laughter had fallen through that missed inhalation and sobbing came in to take its place. For she was crying and saying through her sobs, ‘Damn you, damn you, Charlie. What are ye trying to do to me? What are ye trying to do?’ And Charlie was staring open-mouthed at her and then glancing apprehensively round the café because emotion was playing havoc with her voice, raising and lowering it like someone twiddling the volume knob of a radio. And the match burned Charlie’s forgotten fingers and they dropped it and it broke black and extinguished on the table. His brief sense of triumph and his foolish desire to make her laugh turned to recriminate with him now, and seemed to add their weight to everything she was saying.

  ‘Is it something funny to you, Charlie? Is it?’ Then it came, in gobbets of bemused pain that she couldn’t hold in any longer. ‘What’s wrong, Charlie? What is it? Why wouldn’t ye see me, Charlie? Ah came up to see ye. Why have ye avoided me?’

  As she spoke she was shaking her head as if even now she wanted to deny the words that hissed from her mouth in sibilant pain. Charlie’s face caught and held her anguish like a mirror. He saw that his attempt at flippancy was an insult to what she felt. He had been wrong to think that it was something that didn’t properly belong on her features, was something inappropriate to her. The sadness and bewilderment expressed in her face were very real to her, written in her own calligraphy, and couldn’t be erased with a little laughter. They meant more, and what they meant had to be faced. Charlie looked at her in the light of his own sudden understanding and the rest of the room subsided into darkness. Only Mary mattered, surrounded by his concentration like a patch of light with its ragged edges shading into the dimness of the café, the sounds of which occurred in the furthest distance, a tinkle of teacups coming as fine as needles clashing. Her grief was magnified in his close attention, loomed out at him as something very large. Unable to face it directly all at once, he came at her through a trivial kindness, lifting her cigarette for her, and striking another match and offering it to her like an apology. In the enclosed perspective of their confrontation with each other, the match seemed to burn as big as a candle in his fingers. At first she rejected the light with a preoccupied headshake, but he was gently insistent and finally she took it, sighing and exhaling simultaneously, so that the smoke hung a moment before her mouth, a visual measurement of what she felt, before it dissipated slowly.

  ‘Ah mean, have Ah done something wrong, Charlie? What’ve I done?’

  The pathetic inadequacy of that question, thrown despairingly like a fragile rope across an unbridgeable chasm, was a measure of the hopelessness of trying to tell her what had happened. How could he ever explain to her? How could he hope that she would begin to understand something which he couldn’t understand himself? With how many questions had he himself tried to sound the strange depths of the despair that had possessed him since his father died? How many plumbline reasons had he dropped into it, only to find that they came nowhere near to touching the bottom of what he felt? He only knew that in the face of it nothing else seemed to matter. And how could he explain that to Mary? It was hopeless. All he could do was to try and make her see that none of it was her fault, to show her what weren’t the reasons.

  ‘Mary,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘Ye’re no’ tae think that. You did nothing wrong. Nothing. It isn’t anything like that at all.’

  ‘What is it like then, Charlie? You tell me. Tell me what it is like. It’s been more than a year and we were goin’ to get married and everything. And now ye’ve changed. Ye’ve just changed. Ah don’t even know why, Charlie. Ah don’t know why.’

  ‘Ah don’t know why maself, Mary. It’s just nothin’s the same any mair. Nothin’. But it’s no’ you, Mary. It’s me. It’s something wrong with me. What did you do?’

  ‘Is it because your father’s dead, Charlie?’

  He saw her eyes alert with imminent sympathy, bright as a beagle’s on the scent. For a moment he was tempted to submit to that explanation. He was tired of being hounded with questions and he had a sudden desire to accept that as the reason for the way he was and let Mary’s sympathy overtake him and hold him. It would have been easy and pleasant to let her believe that. He had only to nod and she was ready to forget everything else, to minister sympathy to him. The nearness of her across the table made the prospect unbearably inviting. Perhaps if he just leaned on her now everything would be all right. She might help him to get over it and they could go on as they had been before. He could go back to university. He might look back on this time of his life as the time when he had ‘taken his father’s death badly’. He had heard other people say that sort of thing. Feelings were bearable if you could fit them into a common context. So why couldn’t he make that one affirmative movement of his head that would naturalize this alien feeling in him, give Mary common ground with him and let her help him to overcome it? Surely in a sense she was right. It was because his father was dead. But only in a sense was she right. And not in his sense. That was the insurmountable difference. He knew what she meant when she asked that question. It emerged from an accepted background and in her terms it referred simply to the fact of bereavement. But for him his father’s death had become something much more, straddling his life like a Colossus, and its shadow fell everywhere. It was not for him a self-contained fact. His feeling went beyond bereavement and left him no accepted terms in which he could express it. That was what separated him from everyone else. That was why he couldn’t
talk to John about it. Every word John said took meaning from a frame of reference that had no relevance to Charlie. The same words meant different things for both of them. And with Mary, too, that one question presented no more than a mirage of communication. Charlie saw the desperate loneliness of his position, where nothing could convey what he felt to anyone else. If he said yes to Mary’s question his answer was translated into her own terms which had no relation to what he meant. If he said no, he was lying to himself.

  ‘No,’ he said into the silence that had followed Mary’s question, and the word was like a door blowing irrevocably shut in his mind, keeping Mary out. He paused on the sound of it, feeling it close him finally inside himself. He felt that this was a terrible choice to make, to isolate himself, to reject the help that was being offered. But the help that was offered was help that he did not need. He couldn’t use it. The help that he did need nothing could offer. Was there a choice? ‘No, Mary. It isn’t that. It’s not because my father’s dead.’

  Mary took his answer. She did not realize how close she had come to reaching him. Something had shown for a second in his face that drew her attention like a sudden movement among foliage, but it was gone again almost at once and she assumed she had been wrong. She tried to come at him by another direction, moving unknowingly further from him.

  ‘Charlie, what am Ah meant to do? We both made it this way. You led me to believe. . . It’s not just my fault that I feel this way. Am I supposed just tae stop feeling like this now?’

  Charlie lifted the empty matchbox that lay in the ashtray and turned it in his fingers helplessly.

  ‘Charlie!’ Her voice tried desperately to reach him. ‘Ah love you, Charlie. Ah mean I’ve got this feeling and it’s just about all there is of me. What am I meant to do with it? Just forget it? Ah can’t forget it. How much of me’s goin’ to be left? There’ll be nothing of me left. And it’s your fault, Charlie.’

  Charlie looked at her through the dark bars of his own fingers.

  ‘All right, Mary,’ he said. ‘Right. So it’s my fault.’

  ‘But why? Why are ye doing it? Don’t you love me?’

  Love. The letters writhed in his mind into an unintelligible hieroglyph.

  ‘Ah don’t even know what that means,’ he said.

  ‘Well I know, Charlie. I know what it means. And I’m stuck with it. What do ye want me to do? Wait till you find out? What’s this been for a year if you don’t know? Ah can’t just wait, Charlie. Ah’m not doing it. You can’t ask me to.’

  ‘Nobody’s asking you to wait, Mary,’ he said. ‘Ah know you can’t wait. Ah know it, Mary.’

  She waited for him to say more, but nothing came. He accepted the fact passively, had no reflex to it. He just sat looking at the table and holding the matchbox in his hand like a talisman.

  ‘I didn’t mean that, Charlie,’ she said quietly. ‘Ah just said it. Ah didn’t mean it. Ah would wait. Could we not just go on the same as we’ve been doin’, Charlie? Could we not? And see what happens? Ah’d rather do that than just let it stop. Ah don’t want that to happen. It just can’t happen. We’ll just go on. Ah’m prepared to wait, Charlie. We’ll just go on and we’ll see. It’ll be all right. Ah mean Ah can wait. . .’

  ‘Mary . . .’ Her name gave garrulity the bit, harnessed hope to reality and stopped it dead. ‘You don’t have tae say that. Don’t be like that. You don’t have tae beg for anythin’. You don’t have tae.’

  ‘Don’t Ah, Charlie?’ Her eyes hinted at tears. ‘What makes ye think Ah don’t? Charlie, who would want me now?’

  Her eyes were lowered as she said it and her face was veiled with shame like a yashmak. Charlie stared at her, trying to penetrate it. When he realized what she meant he had a strange chilly sensation as if tentacles were trying to enclose him and draw him in, and he wanted to shake them off in a frenzy of disgust.

  The matchbox burst in his hand, a small explosion of wood.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. You draw the line nae-where, dae ye? That’s the way isn’t it? Every bastard’s on the market for somethin’. An eye for an eye and a marriage for a maidenhead.

  His anger rained words blindly around him and he could barely understand why. Since his father’s death feeling had reduced itself to this eternal anger that ticked quietly inside him like a geiger counter, increasing in frequency without warning when certain words or situations crossed its path. Now it surged to an urgency that deafened reason, and all he could see to attach it to was Mary’s hypocrisy.

  ‘If Ah could give you back your stinking virginity Ah would. That’s all it is for you, isn’t it? Your own wee rotten set-up. It’s like your mother wi’ her bloody antimacassars. One oota place an’ it’s a tragedy. Whit dae ye think life is, somethin’ ye knit tae a pattern oot the Woman’s Own? Nae untidy edges. Listen, Mary. If you’d had it from everybody from Land’s End tae John o’ Groats it wouldny matter a damn. Things wouldny be any worse than they are. How can ye kid yerself on that you matter or Ah matter? Nobody matters. Nobody. Hoor or housewife, whit’s the odds? Maybe yer mither or the neebors wid bother. But that’s all. Nothin’ about you matters. Nothin’.’

  She sat clenched to the table, crying, her face averted as if by a blow. His anger treacherously subsided as suddenly as it had risen, leaving him stranded on the enormity of what he had said. Her passive misery showed him how disproportionate and unjust his anger had been. He writhed in disgust that was a replica of what he had felt looking at Mick lying in his own vomit. Mary’s tears became Elizabeth’s.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ he said. ‘Ach, I’m sorry.’

  He started to break the matchbox methodically into fragments and set them carefully in the ashtray.

  She continued to weep soundlessly, with her eyes closed. He looked down at himself, at the clumsy body and the pink hands that looked like malformed claws and he wondered how this ugly amalgam of bone and flesh could matter so much to anyone. He wondered how the lips could open and close and the teeth click and put forth sounds that could agonize another. How could these pieces of animated clay, happed in a few dreams and pretensions, move among their little lives, an exhalation away from death, and presume to think they mattered? But they did. They were stitched to life by a fraying thread of breath and beyond its breaking they knew nothing, but on it they hung hopes and plans and private certainties. Their assurance belied their nature. They found things to want and people to love and assumed an appearance of sufficiency. And when you took some of it from them, they fought or wept. He looked at Mary and thought that this was just someone sitting in a café. That was all it had been, two people talking in a café, on a Friday night. But Mary dignified it into something more just by feeling as she did about it. And he felt himself made something more significant because he mattered so much to another person. But to realize that was only to torture himself. To allow himself to be involved in it was to share the pretence of everybody else, and that was what he couldn’t do. He couldn’t sit with Mary and pretend to be communicating with her. He had been with her all evening and all they had conveyed to each other were mistakes, indifference and hypocrisy and anger. He respected what the anger had done. It had been misguided, but it had succeeded in cutting the knot that couldn’t be unravelled. His separation from Mary had grown gradually in him, sifting like silt in his mind. Whether he could understand it rationally or not was not the point. It was there. All that had been lacking was their mutual acknowledgment of it. At least his anger had achieved that. To be with each other now was an exercise in masochism, the infliction of mutual pain. Nothing could be said or done to make any difference.

  ‘Please go away, Mary,’ he said. ‘Please go home.’

  She sat till she knew her tears were finished. She picked up her gloves and mechanically pushed back her hair. She paused for a moment as if expecting him to get up and see her home. But he knew the futility of prolonging the time that they were together. What he felt jammed the social reflex to escort her and he sa
t still. She got up and went out and he could see her for a second outside before the darkness swallowed her like jaws.

  The action was somehow too simple. He had a sense of deceit, of mirage, as if where a moment ago there had been so much pain and grief and anger there was now nothing. He looked for signs of it. There was none, only a few pathetic emblems that couldn’t convey what had happened, two crumpled cigarette stubs, the pieces of matchbox pyramidal in the ashtray, a memorial cairn of balsa-wood. He looked round the café, remembering the point when he might have turned the other way, towards Mary and the simple acceptance of things as they were. But that point was irrevocably past. Already the café itself was not the place they had come into. Subtle and unnoticed changes had taken place. The ruminating drunk was gone. The table where the man and woman had sat was empty, cleared of everything but the metal ashtray, anonymously clean. There was no small man or paper or coupon. Their absence seemed to erase the place where Mary and he had sat, to negate what had happened there. Charlie was aware of sitting in a strange place, given over to the preoccupied activities of others.

  Opposite him sat a couple of doubtful age and intentions, looking as if they had been abstracted from a Breughel print. Drink had given their age a new lease of youth and they were canoodling and ogling each other archly. They snuffled and simpered, pecked and withdrew. The woman wore no ring, but Charlie noticed bitterly that what her fingers lacked her eyes more than compensated. The only others were a group of young men who had commandeered the café like soldiers in an occupied country. They would go into a conspiratorial huddle and then break apart, sowing laughter all over the café before settling back into the positions that were the habits of an hour, postures they had reached through the secret and patient sculpture of restlessness. One was sitting with his feet up on a neighbouring chair and his arms around his legs, like ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’, another was rubbing a coin to a desultory polish on his sleeve, a third was picking his nose with an air of dedication. The fourth one was going well, the way it happens sometimes, when the patter comes pat, and every joke rings the bell. He was generating his own atmosphere as he went along, like laughing-gas, so that it was the laughter which made things funny and not the other way round.