Eileen’s sympathy. Yet he went on acting as if they were. For how long? Until Charlie Slade’s epitaph became his own? Pass round the conversation, boys, and put a sentence in. In memory of Eddie Cameron. No. He wasn’t finished yet, he told himself. It would be nice to know who you were before you died. He felt a need to hurry. But there was nowhere to hurry to. The rest of the evening waited for him, talk and jokes and drinks in a conspiracy of slow motion, designed to strangle his urgency. So, nursing his desperation like a time-bomb, he went back to them to become part of the conspiracy again, to nod and smile and not hear what was said.
The rest of the night drifted past him in a meaningless debris of aimless actions and fragments of conversation: the banter when he came back into the dining-room and Jim Forbes’s joke about its being a fine time to phone his fancy-woman, at which Morton didn’t laugh; the journey back home in the car (Jim and Eileen were travelling with them); tailors’ dummies in eerie conclave in bright windows, a cinema disgorging anonymous gobbets of humanity onto the street; Allison and Eileen talking brightly in the back, Jim intoning the respective merits of front-and back-wheel drive (banish technicalities from the language, and what would we find to talk about?), and Morton’s car following a yard from the back fender; thanking Mrs Davis from across the road for baby-sitting; giving out drinks; eating Allison’s delicate supper; giving out drinks.
They were using the living-room because it was warm from the fire kept on for Mrs Davis. Jim’s pleas to have the children brought out of their beds had been swiftly squashed by Allison.
The new cushion interested them, gave rise to jokes. Allison had only bought it the other day. It sat on the settee, too big for it. Too big to be a cushion, really. A hybrid form. As if a car-seat had been crossed with a mattress. And this was their scion. A luxurious deformity.
‘Chinese?’ Forbes was asking.
Because of the huge dragon depicted on it. Did that make it Chinese? Do the Chinese have a monopoly on dragons?
‘Japanese. Naturally,’ Morton pronounced.
Thank you, Morton, san. Purveyor of Culture to Ignorant Masses.
‘Here’s how you should really use it.’
Morton put the cushion on the floor, pulled up his trouser-legs, and squatted cross-legged, his hands inside his jacket-sleeves.
‘All lightee?’
Sedate fountains of jolly laughter from the ladies. Morton bathing in it. May you do yourself an injury with your chopsticks.
‘We’ve got one almost exactly like that,’ Elspeth said. ‘I would say you had been copying. Except that you can’t have seen ours. It’s in the bedroom.’
Satanic oh-hos from Jim Forbes. Why did Allison buy these things anyway? Every so often the fever took her and she went forth to buy, armed only in a vague sort of covetousness. Her sorties had won them a motley assortment of booty. Her trophies were uniform only in their uselessness and their spurious ‘classiness’. One had been a painting – an abstract of bilious ugliness, which Cameron detested and which Allison could only defend wanly as being ‘really contemporary’. She had wanted to hang it in the girls’ bedroom but when Cameron objected, implying that Spock wouldn’t like it, it had been shunted to their room, where it hung above their bed like an invitation to a nightmare. Another buy had been what Allison claimed was an African mask. The face it depicted looked as if it came from darkest Gallowgate. And now the Chinese (Cameron preferred Jim Forbes’s theory) cushion. Soon they wouldn’t be able to see each other for status symbols.
‘Eddie!’ Jim’s voice was confidential. He was taking advantage of the preoccupation of the others. ‘I’ve got a very good night fixed up for us. Next week. Can you make it? Thursday.’
To judge by the furtive excitement of Jim’s tones it should be at least a free run of a harem.
‘I think so, Jim. What is it?’
‘You’re okay for Thursday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Dalmeath Burns Supper. Some night. Special invitations only. We’ll have a great time.’
Cameron couldn’t think of any excuse to make.
‘Drink’s tremendous. Stag night. Good speeches. It’s tough to swing admission. But I’ve managed to get tickets. Only two, though. So keep it quiet just now. You know?’
Jim indicated with a nod to Cameron that Morton’s luck was out and then chimed in with the laughter of the others, deftly camouflaging their transaction in case there should be a stampede for tickets.
‘Fine!’ Cameron muttered, the low pitch of his voice keeping it conveniently neutral. That was another night dead. Even time came pre-packaged. In convenient capsules. To be taken like tranquillisers. Morton reminded him of more.
‘You’re not forgetting next month are you, Eddie?’ he asked.
‘What’s that?’
‘“What’s that?” he says. Some salesmen I’ve got. The conference. In London. The Big Dinner. How could you forget? Different hotel this time. That place last year was a dead loss.’
‘You salesmen have a great life right enough,’ Allison said. ‘Any excuse for a good time.’
‘It’s all business, though,’ Morton said, mock-serious. ‘Mind you, we do manage to squeeze in the odd orgy afterwards. Nero had nothing on us. Talking of orgies. An office-party next month as well. After we get back from London. You’d better lay in a heavy stock of Alka-Seltzer, Eddie. Two of the girls leaving to get married. An epidemic. And then we didn’t have our party at New Year. Thought we’d better celebrate.’
‘Now there’s a thing I’d fancy,’Jim said. ‘A genuine swinging office-party. The only kind we have are tea and buns. Three old maids discussing knitting patterns. And the blokes arguing about eight-iron shots. Your place should be able to generate some action.’
‘It has been known to,’ Morton agreed. ‘Fill in an application form and we might get you a ticket.’
Maybe Jim was regretting rashly promising the extra ticket for Dalmeath to Cameron. He could have used it to influence Morton. Strange how boyishly enthusiastic Jim was about anything that could be construed, however mildly, as a male adventure.
Cameron’s inattention scrambled their talk for several minutes before he tuned in again to Allison and Morton arguing about immigration. How did they get onto that? They were kidding each other clumsily, aware of their audience.
‘West Indians have been exploited long enough by us,’ Allison was saying. ‘We owe them something.’
‘Allison!’ Morton remonstrated. ‘Noble sentiments. But you can’t run a country on them. You’re too generous for your own good.’
‘And you’re too efficient to be altogether human. You can’t streamline human affairs the way you do your work.’
They both laughed. It wasn’t so much an argument as an exercise in verbal back-scratching.
‘How can you live with somebody as efficient as this, Elspeth?’
‘No. But seriously,’ Morton said. ‘We owe them nothing. We gave them the greatest culture in the world. We educated them. Gave them religion. Taught them democracy. Anything we took in return was what they didn’t want. Or couldn’t use. They’re our debtors. And now they want to come over here in hordes. No go. They haven’t reached our level of civilisation yet. They’ll only upset the balance.’
‘Rubbish!’ Cameron said suddenly, surprised to find that his time-bomb had exploded and was after all only a squib. ‘I have seldom heard so much bollocks in such a short space of time. Who the hell are you to set yourself above anybody else? And what have we got that’s so sacrosanct nobody else can share it? Folk like you are so bigoted you could use a thimble for a hat. It’s true that my uncle’s a negro, but that’s not