communication is called for. I had seen it done in the pictures. I lifted a piece of clay and chucked it cautiously at her window. Nothing. So I went on doing it. I was hissing: Linda! Linda! all the time. That was her name. And all the time my ammunition was getting bigger. Till I was really on the heavy bore stuff.’ And you still are, thought Morton. ‘Then, smash! Right through the window. I put in a full pane of glass. What happened after that was strictly Keystone Cops. Lights seemed to go on in every room but hers. I heard footsteps running downstairs. It sounded like a centipede with hobnailed boots. And a dog was barking. I didn’t know what the hell was happening. I was running four ways at once. Then the back-door opened and I hears this voice shouting: ‘Seize ’im, boy!’ Seize ’im? This thing like a Shetland pony comes out, going like a racehorse. I was off. I was wishing they had cut their damned hedges more often. Five feet if they were an inch. I went over with this thing hanging to my bum like a booster-rocket. It must’ve been with me for about a hundred yards. Before I broke free. Never again. I left my arse in San Francisco, right enough. That’s when I took up golf.’
They laughed.
‘It’s a lovely ring, Elspeth.’ Eileen was first with a follow-up, since she had recognised the golfing remark as epilogue.
‘Do you like it?’ Elspeth smiled, her hand turning like a lighthouse.
‘It’s beautiful,’ Allison said. ‘A good bit bigger than the other one, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. The other one’s about the size of yours, Allison. Sid’s been promising me another one for years. And this is it.’
‘Very good too,’ Allison said. ‘Though I always think nothing can replace the sentimental value of the first one. Don’t you? I mean that’s the one you got engaged with, isn’t it?’
‘Oh, I’d never part with mine.’ Eileen looked nostalgically at her own ring, each diamond of which was like a facet of the ones on Elspeth’s ring.
The women withdrew behind the purdah of diamond talk. The men lit Forbes’s cigarettes and blew out smoke signals of satiety.
He took too long, Morton was thinking. Could have taken at least two minutes off the telling. But that was typical. Forbes was one of those people who nearly always pull the punchline too late, so that the joke explodes in their face. His ego bore the marks. He kept trying. But he was one of life’s natural casualties. Amen.
They’re always against himself, Cameron thought. He watched Jim’s face brood upon the moment, hatching another anecdote perhaps. Cameron felt a tremendous liking for him. He tried so damned hard. But it was embarrassing the way he was always so funny about himself – like a cripple whose party piece was balancing on his crutches. He kept showing you his scars and asking you to laugh. Cameron remembered irrelevantly how at school Jim could walk for fifteen yards on his hands. He held the record. They had measured it. He had also been able to skid pebbles on the water more times than anybody else. That was another record. And he could weep anytime at sad films. All the qualities that weren’t viable, he had. It was sad to think that perhaps there were some men who passed their prime with conkers. He had wanted to be a missionary. Now he worked with the Electricity Board. That was a funnier joke than any he could tell – the irony that each of them had to some extent become. Hadn’t idealism festered in every one of them and healed into indifference? Only some of them, like Cameron himself, kept picking off the scab to contemplate the diminishing wound.
What happens to us? Cameron thought. We start out as real people. What makes us hide from our own dreams, submit to a cage cliche, refuse to face each other?
He looked round their table, round the restaurant. He saw them as if under glass cases. Genus suburbanus: found only in semi-detached houses. The sexual behaviour of these creatures is their only interesting feature. After mating, two offspring are produced at intervals mathematically calculated by the female. Whereupon, the female swallows the male whole and re-emits him in the form of a bank-balance. Homo aquaticus: this creature hibernates for fifty weeks of every year. For the other two weeks, it can be seen at coastal resorts being buried by its young. Unfortunately they usually dig it back up. Genus Cameron: this creature is believed to be extinct.
‘Did you hear about Charlie Slade, Eddie?’ Morton asked.
‘What was that?’
‘Died two days ago. Complained of pain in his chest. Doctor thought it was indigestion. Put him to bed with a hot water bottle. Wife called him in the morning. Dead. Thrombosis.’
The three syllables 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
