halted talk for a second, left them listening into the dissipation of the rhythmic word, imperative as a tribal tom-tom. Message received, Allison and Elspeth finished what they had been saying. And that was it, Cameron thought. Morton had delivered his cryptic, cosmic message as anonymously and impassively as a telegram boy. They had all drawn curtains for a moment to watch him, and then shut them again before the reality of it could impinge on them. But Morton wasn’t finished.
‘Funny thing is,’ he said. ‘They’ve been telling me he didn’t have any insurance policy. Nothing. Imagine that. A bloke like Charlie. Always so methodical. Canny. And leaves his wife in dire straits.’
A nice, sanitary cliche: ‘He left his wife in dire straits’. Our lives are intricately plumbed with cliches, a vast network of ready-made words to pipe away inconvenient feelings, dispose hygienically of responses: ‘It’ll all come all right in the end’, ‘It comes to us all’, ‘Why worry?’ Faced with the reality of experience, all you had to do was consign it to a cliche and flush it out of your life. How old was Charlie? Thirty-seven, thirty-eight. Three children, two marriages, years of work and worry, holidays by the seaside, plans and failures had worked patiently on his body towards that moment in the night when his heart would burst like an evil seed and flower into his dying. Offended by the clumsy pointlessness of his corpse, you covered it with a comment: ‘He left his wife in dire straits.’ And nobody need bother any further. Except Eileen.
‘His wife’s left with the three children? They still had the child from his previous marriage, didn’t they?’
‘Yes,’ Morton said. ‘Charlie got custody. His wife had committed misconduct.’
‘My God! Three children. The youngest one’s only about two. How is she going to live? My God, it’s terrible.’
Eileen was attacking her gateau as if it was a pain-killer. Her manifestation of sympathy was mechanical and controlled and didn’t disturb the elan with which she ate. Cameron had known her as a girl, very sensitive and emotional. But time had corroded her sentiment to sentimentality and rusted her reactions into gestures. Perhaps it was because she had never had any children that she had developed a vaguely maternal affection for any kind of pain that crossed her path. She moved about her life as responsive to every touch as a barrel-organ, and whatever event might turn the handle, dead relative or limping dog, it was the same worn and tinny tune it summoned forth, fretted indelibly on her heart by the dull uniformity of her life.
‘He used to work with Auld and Simpson,’ Morton ruminated. ‘By the way, Eddie. How are things going with you and them?’
‘All right. Should have something definite fairly soon. That reminds me. I’ve got a phone-call to make. Business before pleasure. Excuse me.’
‘I’ll get you out,’ Jim said, getting up. ‘I think I’ve got a watering-can for a bladder.’
Cameron had invented the phone-call as an escape hatch but Forbes’s presence trapped him in it. He had to phone somebody.
‘Have you got change?’ Jim waited with him, generously sacrificing the demands of his bladder to those of friendship.
‘Yes, thanks.’
Cameron lifted the receiver as Jim went off. He dialled TIM. ‘Pip. Pip. At the third stroke it will be nine thirty-five and ten seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip. At the third stroke it will be nine thirty-five and twenty seconds.’ The voice was cold, remote – talking marble. The pips were thawing ice. It was like being tuned in to the core of all erosion, the dripping of an unquenchable wound. When Jim patted his shoulder on the way back into the dining-room, Cameron was still listening blankly: . . . ‘it will be nine thirty-eight and forty seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip.’
He put down the receiver. He couldn’t face going back into the restaurant just yet to listen to their perfunctory voices. He wondered what Margaret was doing. Why couldn’t he be with her now, the curtains drawn, and only the two of them together, growing again into people in each other’s presence. It only needed one big, positive action to reorientate his life. To walk out now and drive to Margaret’s would be enough. He turned and made towards the door. The design of foliage on the carpet stretched before him like a jungle. The thick glass doors gave him back the hotel lobby as if the night outside was only an extension of this room. Voices came from the lounge-bar on his left and he turned desperately towards them, losing himself among them, knowing as he did so that the voice locked in the recesses of the phone was coldly deducting every second from his life.
The air of the lounge was meshed with smoke and every table was fortified by earnest talk against intrusion. Cameron saw a space at the bar beside a large balding man who stared into his drink as if he was angling it. Cameron won to the space and asked for a double whisky.
He couldn’t just walk out on Allison at a time like this. It wasn’t even practical. He was the only one with a housekey, for one thing. And he hadn’t paid his share of the bill. It was ridiculous how circumstances held the grandest intentions trapped like a staked bear while trivia snapped at it like terriers until they wore it into submission. Just when you were about to jump the moon, you tramped on your turnups.
‘Do you have any children?’
Cameron thought he was overhearing someone’s conversation and his glance was automatic. But it was at him that the large balding man was staring, his eyes muddied with drink. Cameron realised at once why there had been a space beside him at the bar. An aggressive gloom surrounded him like a railing.
‘Have you any children? I’ve got children.’
He was so drunk you could almost see each thought well to the surface of his eyes like a dead fish. Cameron decided that talk was the best method of defence.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got two.’
‘I’ve got children. I’ve got three children. Two daughters and a son. The boy’s only ten.’
Silence followed and Cameron began to think it was finished, that the big man had been concerned merely to deliver a brief bulletin on progeny.
‘How many children have you got?’
‘I’ve got two.’
‘See that they take their sugar.’
‘They always do. Plenty of it.’
‘Their polio sugar. The vaccine. See that they take it. They’ve got to take their sugar. Ralph was taking his. One lump to go. One bloody lump. And he got polio. Calliper. His leg’s no thicker than that.’ He held up a wavering forefinger. ‘That’s him for the rest of his life. The bastards. That’s a good break to give a boy. Because there was one lump to go. One lump of sugar between him and a full life.’
The big man’s massive futility swelled Cameron’s, towered into a wave that swamped him. Surfacing for a second, Cameron reached for the first thought that came to him, and said, ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘I don’t want your bloody drink.’
The big man’s face pitched close for a second and then receded into the distance of its private storm.
Cameron came out of the lounge and stood for a moment, as if he had lost his way. It wasn’t that he had been particularly moved by the big man’s dilemma. He even doubted that what he had heard was medically feasible. But it seemed to have a certain poetic truth. In the large, pulpy face he recognised the fist-marks of his own world. That’s what he was up against too – a world in which the omission of a sugarlump could wither your leg, where the infinite ways of losing nullified all the permutations of precaution. Each day chance was infiltrating its bacilli: brakes wore; blood clotted; feet slipped; smoke tarred the lungs; worries gnawed at the struts of the mind. Some time one or more of these would win. Meanwhile the calendars hung in rooms, icons of emptiness, computing coincidence. He felt years sifting away from him, and he was left with no more concrete measurement of their passing than the spaces in his diary, bleak tundras of paper on which survived a few skeletal facts, fragile as moth’s bones, crumbling to shapelessness in a month’s turning: ‘Remember