The Kiss

by Joan Lingard

Sophie clicks her fingers at a waitress and calls out, ‘Two more glasses of red wine, please!’

  ‘Sophie!’ he protests weakly. He feels weak and at the same time angry that Clarinda Bain should have such an effect on him. He wants to put his hands round her smooth young neck and throttle her.

  ‘I can drink far more than that,’ says Sophie. ‘I won’t fall over in the gutter or anything like that.’

  He doesn’t doubt it. ‘How much do you drink anyway? Too much?’

  ‘Not regularly.’

  ‘You’re not into drugs, are you? You wouldn’t, would you?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t. Not real drugs. I’ve had the odd smoke but that’s all, honest!’

  The wine comes and they drink it and he doesn’t allow himself to turn his head, though his ear is cocked, listening for sounds coming from the table behind him. He hears the rise and fall of Clarinda’s voice and then, later, the scrape of chairs which suggests they are preparing to leave. He keeps his eyes down and remembers Rodin’s statue of The Muse with downcast eyes and Clarinda studying it, enraptured. A shadow falls over the table and passes on. It was her; he recognised her walk. Then comes a second shadow and a voice says, ‘Cormac, how’re you doing?’

  He looks up at Robbie.

  ‘Not bad.’ He introduces Sophie. ‘How’re you doing yourself, Robbie?’

  ‘I’m at the uni. Doing architecture.’

  ‘Great! Nice to see you.’

  ‘You too.’

  Robbie leaves to join Clarinda.

  ‘Shall we get the bill?’ says Cormac.

  When it arrives he takes out his wallet. He looks inside. He leans on one hip and rummages in his trouser pocket.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ asks Sophie. ‘Haven’t you got enough money?’

  ‘Not quite. It was the extra wine. And I’ve forgotten my damned chequebook. Damn and blast!’

  ‘How much are you short?’

  ‘Four forty. Got anything on you?’

  ‘Hang on.’ From the depths of her drawstring bag Sophie produces a purse shaped like a pouch that is also drawn together round the neck by a cord. The purse is bulging with coins. They come spilling out when she loosens the string. He catches two fifty pence pieces before they bounce off the table onto the floor. Sophie lays out in small heaps on the table four pounds forty pence in two, five, ten and twenty pence pieces. When she has finished the purse is still more than half full. How has she come to have so many coins? Has she been busking? But she can’t sing, as far as he’s aware, and the only instrument she plays is a piano, which is not suited to being dragged onto the streets. He doesn’t ask the question. Typical of you, Cormac! He can hear Rachel’s voice in his ear. She would certainly ask.

  When she rings that evening she has plenty of questions to put to him. ‘Did you ask Sophie?’ is only the beginning.

  ‘Ask her what?’

  ‘What she does when she plays hookey. Cormac, don’t tell me you forgot!’

  ‘I didn’t get round to it, but I will. We were talking about other things.’

  ‘You’re hopeless.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Where is she now?’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘She didn’t tell me. You know what fifteen-year-old girls are like.’

  ‘Did you ask?’

  ‘Well, no.’

  ‘I always ask.’

  ‘And do you think she always tells you the truth? I believe she was going out with her friend Tilda.’

  ‘Tilda,’ sniffs Rachel. ‘Mm.’

  ‘How’s Davy?’ he asks.

  ‘Fine. He’s in bed, fast asleep. He was very tired.’

  He senses an accusation in that statement: Davy is catching up on his sleep because he has not had enough during the week when he was with his father. In truth, Davy has had a number of late nights recently. Cormac becomes restless when he is forced to spend evening after evening cooped up in the small space of the Colony flat. They have gone out to eat a few times, usually to Henderson’s, a vegetarian restaurant, an Edinburgh institution, and sat listening to men playing guitars and banjos. He’ll have to put a stop to it, this eating out. No wonder he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill at lunchtime. Remembering that and the coins pouring out of Sophie’s purse he feels uneasy.

  ‘How much pocket money are you giving Sophie?’ he asks.

  Rachel tells him. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Nothing. No reason.’ He shouldn’t have asked. Rachel could catch any nuance floating on the wind; her antennae are permanently on alert.

  ‘I must go,’ she says. ‘Catch up on the ironing.’ She claims to find ironing a soothing occupation, once you surrender and get down to it. He seldom manages to get down to it but vows that he must try and send out Davy to school looking a bit smoother.

  When he replaces the receiver he realises that it is Saturday evening and he may do as he chooses since he is free from childcare. Ken Mason, a former colleague, has invited him to a party. He hasn’t been in a mind to go until now when he sees the empty evening yawning ahead. Ken is the only one of the staff to have kept in touch with him. After his suspension Cormac found that the others, when he did run into them, backed away quickly, looking at their watches, remembering imminent appointments. The neighbours also gave him a wide berth. There was a report in The Scotsman that did not name him initially but he imagined that everyone in Edinburgh must know that it was him. He felt like a marked man, and at the slightest blink of sun he took to wearing dark glasses.

  ‘Claims that an Edinburgh art teacher made sexual advances to a female pupil during a recent trip to Paris are being investigated by Edinburgh and Lothian police. After twenty pupils and two teachers returned from France the police were contacted by the girl’s mother, who claimed that the behaviour of the teacher in question towards her daughter had been inappropriate. A spokeswoman said that enquiries were still at an early stage and all the pupils who had been on the trip would be questioned. It is understood that the girl, at the time, was fifteen.’

  Chapter Five

  He decides to go to Ken Mason’s party rather than sit in the flat feeling sorry for himself. The Masons live on the other side of town, the south side. He puts on his cycling cape and bumps his bike down the steps. It is fair when he sets out but halfway there the sleet starts and by the time he reaches his destination his slicker is dripping and his legs are sodden from the knee down. He throws off the slicker and eases his cords away from his knees. He probably shouldn’t have worn cords, come to think of it; he always relied on Rachel to tell him what to wear when they were going out, she seems to have a sixth sense that tells her these things. Through the lit-up, uncurtained bay window he sees a room full of dark suits. He only has one suit, bought at an Oxfam shop, which he keeps for weddings and funerals. Funerals, mostly. That reminds him: he must ring his mother tomorrow. It’s her birthday. Her eighty-first.

  Lorna Mason opens the door to him. A heavy wave of perfume gushes out from her.

  ‘I’ve got wet knees, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Sounds sexy.’ He doesn’t like her smile.

  ‘Doesn’t feel it, I’m afraid. My cords are clinging to me.’

  ‘Perhaps we could find you a pair of Ken’s trousers. What size would you be?’ She gazes at his lower half.

  He backs away. ‘No, no, these’ll soon dry.’

  ‘Trust you to come on your bike on a filthy night like this, Cormac. You artists! So impractical. Do you want to bring it in?’ She is looking dubiously at the bike.

  ‘I’ll just padlock it to the railings, if your neighbours wouldn’t object?’

  Lorna takes his slicker between her raspberry-tipped fingernails and hurries it at arm’s length through to the rear premises before it can make too many drips on her parquet hall floor. Cormac follows on, uttering cries of apology for being such a nuisance.

  ‘It’s all right, Cormac, I don’t mind. It’s so lovely to see you. It’s b
een ages.’ She plants a raspberry kiss on his cheek, then leans back to study his face. ‘You have been having an awful time of it, haven’t you, poor you? Girls these days are such hussies. One of my mother’s words.’ She laughs. ‘So forward, aren’t they? In my day we wouldn’t have dreamt of looking at a teacher. Well, we might just have looked, but we certainly wouldn’t have touched. I’m always warning Ken to beware, to keep a clear space between him and the pupils, and what happened to you just proves it.’

  She takes him through to the sitting room, puts a drink into his hand and introduces him to a woman whose name he doesn’t catch. She is around his own age and he notices that she is not wearing a wedding ring. He has started to notice such things, whereas before they would never register. ‘You’re a bachelor now,’ Ken told him on the phone. ‘Free, in the market again, up for grabs.’ Ken sounded envious. After Cormac was charged they had a few drinks together and Ken said, ‘I’ve always thought she was a bit of all right, Miss Clarinda Bain,’ and he moved in closer to Cormac at the bar expecting a confidence. ‘She’s got fantastic legs. And boobs. Her mother’s not bad, either. Think she rather fancies me, does Mrs Bain. She gave me the eye at the last Parents’ Night.’

  The woman he has been introduced to reveals that she is an insurance broker. ‘You’re a colleague of Ken’s, I believe?’

  ‘Was. I’ve changed careers.’

  ‘How interesting. I admire people with the courage to do that. What are you doing now? Did you have to re-train?’

  He tells her that he is a sandwich-maker and she smiles, somewhat wanly, not knowing whether he is having her on or not, and he sympathises. Making small talk at parties is bloody awful and the reason that he usually avoids them. If he were to say so now that might relax them both but he can’t be bothered and he doesn’t want to encourage her, or anybody else. For that was his downfall, after all, wasn’t it? Giving encouragement, without sufficient thought. It was irresponsible, leading your students into the world of the imagination. Anyway, he doesn’t like the woman’s lower lip; it’s too thin and bloodless. You’re too fussy, Ken would say. It’s not long before the woman sees someone across the room that she ought to speak to and excuses herself.

  He finishes his drink and seeks out another. Once he has a goodly amount of alcohol in him he finds the party tolerable and chats idly to a number of people whom he will not remember the next day and is happy not to. It is a way of passing time. He makes a move to leave before the main decampment. Lorna, who has been guzzling gin, sees him unsteadily to the door.

  ‘Why don’t you drop in and see me sometime, Cormac? You’re always out and about on your bicycle, aren’t you? I’d invite you to lunch but you can’t do lunch, can you? You have those frightful sandwiches to make. What a bore. But what about after lunch? A post-prandial drink? It’s nice and quiet here at that time of day. You can’t have to look after Davy every afternoon surely? He must go to swimming or karate or something. All the kids do. I’ll phone you.’

  He plants a swift kiss on her proffered face, since it is expected, managing to avoid her mouth, less raspberry-coloured than it was earlier but still not appealing, then he hoists himself back into the saddle and takes off. It feels good to have the road running underneath him again. He doesn’t even mind the sleet-laden wind in his face.

  The city looks magical under its soft tailing curtain of white, the lights from the lamps fuzzy and blurred, the greyness of the tone muted, the sound of traffic dimmed. At the top of the Mound he slows to look down at the spread of lights in Princes Street below. A passing car comes too close and the bike wobbles in its back draught; he curses and tries to right the machine but the road is slippery and he goes into a skid and in the next instant he hits the road and the back wheel is spinning in the air.

  He was eight years old, the age his son is now. He was coming too fast down the hill, as he was often tempted to do, and had many times done, but this time he was not going to be able to stop, he knew he was not, the road was glassy after a drizzle of rain, and he had left braking too late. Another child on a bicycle pulled out of a side street, straight into his path. He swerved, squeezing both brakes hard, and was thrown up and over the handlebars to hit the road. The rest was blackness, until some hours later he awoke in a swoon of whiteness to find his mother by his bed, flanked by two of the aunts, Lily and Sal. The faces of the women looked wretched and pale. His mother reached for his hand.

  ‘Cormac, thanks be to God. We’ve been praying for you throughout the night and the Lord has seen fit to answer our prayers. Can you hear me, son?’

  Yes, he could hear her, though her voice seemed distant and disembodied, as if it were coming from somewhere in the air above her. Sal gave him a drink of water, holding the tumbler to his mouth. His teeth clunked against the glass, water dribbled down his cheek. He ran his tongue along the rim of his lips; they felt scored, like sandpaper. Suddenly, he remembered the greasy road and that terrible feeling of losing control and the boy coming out of the side road.

  He found his voice.

  ‘What happened to the other boy?’ he cried.

  ‘Now don’t go fussing yourself, son,’ said Lily, tucking the sheet in tidily around him. All of the aunts called him son so that often he felt he had five mothers, all of whom but Sal took it upon themselves to watch over his moral wellbeing. Sal was the subversive one in the family and had already been married and divorced.

  ‘Is he all right?’ Cormac struggled to sit up.

  ‘Hush now, love,’ said his mother. ‘Lie back there and rest yourself. It wasn’t your fault. It was an accident.’

  He was allowed to go home after a week in hospital but it took him many more weeks to recover fully. He had a broken leg and arm and he suffered from headaches. Every night he dreamt of the boy emerging from the side street and he wakened screaming.

  ‘It was my fault,’ he told his mother.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said, holding him so close that he could feel her heart beating. ‘It was an accident. A man and a woman waiting on a bus saw it all happening. They say the boy came out without looking. They told the police.’

  ‘But if I’d braked earlier—’

  ‘You mustn’t blame yourself, son. Nobody else does.’

  What about God? He was all-seeing, all-knowing. He must have seen him coming down the hill too fast. Cormac tried to confess but the priest blocked his confession, telling him, as his mother had, that it was an accident and no blame was attributed to him.

  ‘You don’t have to go around feeling guilty, lad. You didn’t want to kill that boy, did you?’

  Of course he hadn’t. He hadn’t even known him and was glad of that, at least. He could no longer bear to go down the street where the boy had lived, in case he’d see the boy’s mother’s face at the window. There were a lot of things he couldn’t bear. Some were understandable, the adults agreed, like the sight of a bicycle. But school now, that was a different matter. When it was time for him to go back he started to vomit. His mother was worried sick.

  ‘Leave him be for a while, Mrs Aherne,’ advised the doctor. ‘Let him do his school work at home. He’ll come back to his old self, given time.’

  His aunts brought him books and games to play like Ludo and Monopoly. He liked it best when Sal came. She was the youngest of the sisters, his mother the eldest. Sal smoked flat Turkish cigarettes in a jade-green holder and said things that made him laugh. She talked to him about the man she’d married. His name was Jake. Jake the Rake, she called him. He had run off with another woman, which didn’t seem to have bothered her. ‘It was good riddance. I married him too hastily. He had a soft tongue on him, heavy on the charm, you know what I mean? He could talk you into anything, but he was light on the follow-up. I’m doing rightly on my own.’ She had a job as a saleswoman in the lingerie department of Anderson and McAuley. Ten years further down the line she would annoy her family further by up and marrying a Dublin publican whose pub she inherited on his early death. The li
fe suited her.

  One day, she arrived carrying a large box.

  ‘Clay,’ she announced, setting it on the table. ‘For making models. Then you can fire them in the oven. I remember when you were small how you were always making things with plasticine. You’ve got good strong square hands, like your da had. Your hands remind me of his. You remind me a lot of him though I wouldn’t say that if your mother was around.’ His mother had gone to do her turn at cleaning the church.

  That was the beginning for him. The clay absorbed him. His fingers began to work, to knead, to mould, and, finally, a shape would begin to emerge, the reward, bringing with it a rush of pleasure. ‘Look, Mum!’ he’d cry. ‘That’s not bad, son,’ she’d say, nodding her head. He made the animals that went into the ark, two by two, and then he made Noah and Noah’s wife. His mother approved of the biblical theme. She baked his creations, as she called them, in the oven and didn’t even complain about the cost of the gas. He began, too, to build shapes from other materials, spent matchsticks, empty packets, sewing spools stripped of their thread, kirby grips and hat pins. His mother said she could leave nothing lying about. It was like having a magpie in the house. But she smiled while she said it.

  ‘He loves making things so he does,’ his mother said to Sal. ‘He’s at it all day long. It’ll be a nice hobby for him so it will.’

  Shortly afterwards, Sal persuaded him to get back on his bike.

  Coming up the steps, carrying his bike on his shoulder, he hears his phone ringing and wonders who it could be at this hour of the night. Rachel always says that when the phone rings late it’s usually someone from Ireland. The Irish on the whole go to bed later than the Scots and think nothing of phoning for a midnight chat. His mother! She wouldn’t phone herself, she is an early bedder, but it could be one of her sisters or a neighbour to say she’s had a fall and can he come over. He awaits that news which some day surely must come. As he fumbles with the key he wonders why Sophie doesn’t answer the damned thing. He told her to be back by twelve and it’s now gone one. She could be sleeping the sleep of the dead, she’s capable of it. The ringing is going on and on. He pushes open the door, drops the bike and hurries into the living room.