A Gift from Nessus. William McIlvanney

looked very ugly. Her voice lisped with slaver and her breathing was noisy. To Cameron, her face seemed no more than a breaking dyke that could barely hold back the snot and phlegm that shifted behind it. Her skin looked about to thaw into a watery pulp.

      ‘I’ve had to learn,’ he said.

      It had achieved two things, anyway: it had finished their quarrel, and it proved they were still alive. Her tears were a bitter sort of manna, falling from her eyes like the grace of God. At least they were still sufficiently alive to be hurt by each other. Not all their words were powerless. They weren’t quite immune to every truth. Perhaps there was hope for them.

      Allison still sat weeping in her underwear like an X-certificate Victorian etching: The Discarded Wife. The ludicrousness of her grief touched a nerve of sympathy that the grief itself had missed. Cameron felt guilty that such bitter tears should seem ridiculous to him. The reason for them was real enough to her, and perhaps his indifference was a measurement of the distance they had put between each other. The chasms that people cleft between themselves were awful, giddy, hardly to be crossed. Sifting, eroding, lives changed irrevocably, stranding people in themselves. It happened imperceptibly, grain by grain, too subtle to be noticed. But hearts were precise seismometers, and every mood, every pain, every disillusion was meticulously recorded, so that people who had once been near enough to touch could turn round and find each other miles away, with gorges that seemed impassable between them. And he and Allison had once been in love with each other. And somehow they still were. Looking at her, he could see one reason why. Her body was marvellously fluent yet. Two children had done no more than soften her hard nubility, add a nuance of more flesh. At thirty-four, her body seemed not to have yielded a pore of its prime. What a waste, he thought, remembering too those other things, of which that body seemed the last survivor, the naturalness, the quick laughter, the easy happiness, the honesty. Those other gifts had not been easily surrendered, had been won from her by long attrition, and partly by his help. What both were, both of them had helped to make, and each was responsible in some sense for the other. Feeling that, he wanted to make love to her, locking them together. All they could do was surrender to each other, go on again and again making that ultimate act of mutual submission, in the hope that from the recurrent ashes of their passion would come some kind of benediction, some kind of grace in the coolness of whose shadow they could meet. If they couldn’t irrigate the desert, at least they could lay the dust. Intermittent truce was a sort of substitute for reconciliation. But even as he made to move to her, she spoke.

      ‘It’s not for my own sake I worry so much. I can bear it. It’s for the children. It’s them I want to have everything.’

      The mock stoicism blighted his intention instantly, the hypocrisy of it made dust of his desire. He stayed where he was. The game demanded that you forgot temporarily those things about each other you despised. She had pushed her dishonesty in his face, like a scab. He had to wait for disgust to ebb. So passion is schooled by time, chastised by circumstance, and the honesty of lust must learn the devious manners of love. Perhaps that was all love meant: teaching lust to be patient and to work towards the achievement of mutual moments. In the meantime, all he could do in the way of union with her was to acknowledge his own part in what she had become, to admit that he must share it with her, as she must take her share in what he was. As she spoke again, he felt that she was setting up an echo that would never end for him.

      ‘My only worry is the children. And what we can do for them.’

      There was the sound of bare feet in the hall and the door opened the way doors do at moments of tension in a film, inching towards revelation. Helen stood there, her hands grubbing in her eyesockets for wakefulness. She unearthed enough vision to see her father and then ran blindly towards him, sticking to him like a burr.

      ‘I had a bad dream, daddy,’ she said, offering him her defencelessness like a trophy.

      She was too sleepy to notice that her mother had been crying. Cameron held her to him for a second, savouring the release of her arrival like a deus ex machina, a divine simplification of all their seedy complexities.

      ‘Come on, love,’ he said. ‘It’s all right now.’

      He scooped her off her feet and took her out. In the hall, she found she needed the toilet. She let him put on the light for her but closed the door on him, having learned dignity young. As he brought her back, Allison was waiting composedly in the hall and the two of them touched briefly over Helen, as if she was neutral territory.

      In her bedroom, Cameron tripped over one of Alice’s slippers. When he laid Helen down, she still held on to his neck and her voice disturbed Alice, who wakened briefly, touched her father’s arm, and promptly fell asleep again. Cameron remained crouched over the bed while Helen drowsed. The weight of her arms on his neck reminded him of Alice’s arms and of Allison’s, and of Margaret’s. He felt weighted down and trapped by his strangely alloyed loves for all of them, caught in them like golden shackles. And he couldn’t imagine any event that would ever provide him with a hammer strong enough to free himself.

      7

      The clatter of typewriter keys in the main office punctured his concentration like buckshot. He was sitting in Annette’s glorified cubicle adjoining Morton’s sanctum. Through the glass partition that separated him from the main office, he could see the rows of well groomed girls chained to their tasks, an industrial harem. That noise was all he needed. He had wakened with a head like an open wound, and every sound was salt to it. Now the pain in his stomach was starting up again. It promised to be quite a day.