expressed it. You're so determined to get at your partner, you trample over innocent people to do it. Sandra was really quite attractive. Why did he have to scrawl his graffiti all over her face?
‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Gill shouted. ‘Robert Redford?’
‘No. I don't kid myself. I'm not entering any beauty contests. It was you that put Sandra in for one.'
‘That takes me to the fair. It really does. Men.' Gill was looking solely at Elspeth now. Brian was being helplessly herded into the same pen as Tom for slaughter. They think they've got the right to sit there and pass judgment. It doesn't matter that they look like something the cat brought in.'
‘You asked my opinion. I don't have any illusions about me.’
‘Don't have any illusions? I've seen you shaving.’
‘Sorry?’
‘I've seen you shaving.’
‘Please, darling. Not such intimate secrets in front of our guests.’
‘You know what I mean. The way you look at yourself.’
‘That's quite a handy thing to do when you're shaving. What do you want me to do? Shave with the light out?’
‘The way you look at yourself. From this side and that side. Head back, head forward.’
‘Jesus Christ!’
Elspeth froze. She hated swearing. He had heard Brian say ‘Damn!’ once. He thought it was during an earthquake.
‘Uh-huh,’ Gill was saying. ‘For someone who seems to be so ugly, Sandra's done all right for herself.’
Tom's advance observation post went into action, assessing the range. He knew where the next attack was coming from. She was shifting position to hit him where he was weakest, as the successful provider, the man who was all for his family. She was also bringing Brian in behind her (she already had Elspeth) with the heavy artillery. The big guns of ‘career consolidation’ were trundling behind her.
‘Look at the husband she has.’
He needed a pre-emptive strike. First obliterate Elspeth - one fewer to worry about. Then a diversionary tactic.
‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ!’ he said. Elspeth took both barrels and spoke no more. ‘Before this conversation finishes up being conducted in Sanskrit. Two things. I didn't say Sandra was ugly. And I'd rather not look at Ted Hayes. If I can help it.’
‘What? Is there something wrong with Ted Hayes now?’
It had worked. He concealed his success under exasperation.
‘Holy bejesus!’
‘It's incredible.’
‘Hear, hear.’
‘It's incredible. According to you, there's something wrong with everybody. God and I both feel . . .’ She hit home there. It wasn't that he thought there was something wrong with everybody but he couldn't see the amazing rightness that everybody else seemed to see. He was aware of an awful lot wrong with him - but what exactly? Gill was always ready to help him with that one. ‘You're a creep. You don't approve of Ted Hayes either? Is there something wrong with him?’
‘Aye! As a matter of fact there is. He would bore the shite out you at a hundred yards. That's what's wrong with him. If they bottled him, they could sell him in Boots the chemist. As a bloody sedative!’
‘No, you wouldn't approve of him, would you?’
‘He's a uxorious wee turd.’
‘Oh, we're on the Eng. Lit. words now, are we? “Uxorious.” But the last one let you down a bit, didn't it? Like a birthmark. Uxorious! That just means he's nice to his wife. Doesn't it? Of course, I can see how that would be an insult in your vocabulary.’
‘What it means is he runs after her like a wee waiter. He probably bottles her farts for posterity. He needs her round him like an oxygen tent. If she goes out the room for five minutes, poor wee bugger's gaspin’ for breath.'
He was cresting the hill of his rage like Alaric the Goth. But suddenly Rome was shut for the night. Gill sat back without warning and sighed and shook her head with something that looked like sad contentment. It seemed she hadn't been taking part in an argument, just a demonstration. He stood fully caparisoned with no enemy in sight, only some bemused tourists thinking: ‘Look at that funny man. Why is he so excited?’
Childe Roland had come to the dark tower and set his slug-horn to his lips and the tower had disappeared. Hm. Well. All he could think of to do was give the solitude he found himself in a final defiant blast.
‘Anyway,’ Gill was saying to Elspeth and Brian. ‘They seem happy. Their lives are completely unruffled.’
‘So they should be,’ he said, unnecessarily loudly. ‘They're as good as dead. Nothing out of the ordinary's ever going to happen there. Any time life comes near wee Ted, it falls asleep.’
The room went quiet.
AS QUIET AS A ROOM IN EDINBURGH, to which his seemingly incurable discontent with things would bring him. He stared at the fading, leafy pattern on the carpet. It might have been an old forest he was lost in. Was there some wrong turning he had taken when he was young? Perhaps seeing so many films in his boyhood and adolescence had helped to confuse him about who he was. Maybe his multiple-identity problem came, in the first place, from growing up in a small town where there were seven cinemas.
There was the Plaza and there was the Empire and the Regal and the Palace and the Savoy and the George and the Forum. He found something appropriate in the grandeur of the names, the way they resonated in his head. For these were embassies of world experience located in his home town. Just by entering their doors he could learn, however haltingly, the foreign inflections of other people's lives, usually translated very wilfully into a broad American idiom that became his second language.
His favourite was the Savoy because, having fallen on hard times and being very run-down, it never showed the new films. It recycled old pictures endlessly and it would be much later that he would realise why that battered building had meant so much to him, why he would always remember with affection the wooden benches for children at the front (where, if a friend arrived late, you could always make a space for him by a group of you sliding along in concert and knocking off whoever was sitting at the end of the bench) and the padded seats that sometimes spilled their wiry guts like a device to keep you awake during the film.
It had been, without his knowing it, his personal art cinema, where he could re-read films the way he could re-read books and develop unselfconsciously his own aesthetic of the movies and confirm what kind of man he was going to be, what kind of woman he would marry. He watched and listened attentively, his face pale as a pupa in the back-glow from the screen while the gigantic figures raged and kissed and taught him passion and style and insouciance and stoicism, before he knew the words for them.
‘FRANKLY, MY DEAR, I DON'T GIVE A DAMN,' Clark Gable tells Tam more than once.
‘Made it. Ma - top o’ the world,' James Cagney seems often to be shouting.
‘Do you always think you can handle people like, eh, trained seals?’ Lauren Bacall says.
‘Where do the noses go?’
‘Never's gonna be too much soon for me. Shorty.’
‘Does that clarinet player have no soul?’
‘We are all involved.’
‘By Gad, sir, you're a chap worth knowing. ‘Namazing character. Give me your hat.’
‘Get yourself a phonograph, jughead. I'm with him.’
And Garbo stares at him and Ava Gardner lounges barefoot. Peter Ustinov preserves his tears in a phial. Charlton Heston fights Jack Palance to the death. Rhonda Fleming makes him wish for a machine by which