better get home and packed,’ Kate said.
‘It’s no big deal,’ Jacqui said. ‘We’re going for a weekend, not a fortnight.’
‘What’s that?’ Alison said.
‘Something you don’t want to know about,’ Jacqui said, as she led them in the opposite direction from the sounds of violence to look for a taxi.
‘Don’t expect too much to happen till Saturday night,’ Alison said. ‘That’s when the Willowvale effect takes over. It takes that length of time for things to happen.’
Jacqui looked at her.
‘I can hardly wait.’
‘Andrew Lawson,’ Kate said. ‘He sounded as if he wasn’t sure who he was, never mind who I was.’
‘He would be pissed,’ Jacqui said.
‘Unlike us,’ Alison said.
‘I think he was. Or maybe he’d been sleeping. He sounded like that.’
They were laughing.
‘In fact,’ Kate said, ‘I think he’d gone back to sleep before I put the phone down.’
When he woke up, he was still sitting in his chair. Daylight was remaking the furniture. The stiffness in his neck told him reproachfully that he had slept here all night. He waited for his brain-cells to regroup. How long was it since he had checked on Catriona? Hopefully she was still asleep. Oh, hopefully. The fervour of his wish made him feel guilty. This guilt replaced the guilt that she might not be sleeping.
He waited. Sometimes it seemed to him that he was always waiting. For what? For death? But whose death? His or someone else’s? He shied away from a thought that confronted him with guilt yet again. He wondered how he had come to be trapped in such a warren of guilt. He hated guilt, how destructively addictive it could become. It paralysed you. There was an ironic thought. Could you develop paralysis by association, by proximity to the paralysed? The self-pity of the idea was enough to make you feel guilty, he thought, smiling bitterly to himself. He noticed the residue of whisky in the glass beside him.
He knew he was drinking too much. Every glass he took brought questions with it. What if a crisis arose and he was drunk? What if he fell asleep and Catriona needed him? It was as if every impulse had to submit itself to a committee before it could be fulfilled. Even this trip – two nights away with a couple of colleagues and a group of students – spoke quietly to him of selfishness.
At least he was going. This was the one time away he was sure of every year. Perhaps the number of trips he had already taken made it easier to do it again. Perhaps the repetition of an action numbed the guilt of it.
Certainly, most times when he had a desire to do something solely for himself, the intention became so enmeshed in complications of doubt that he usually finished up doing nothing. It was easier that way. Perhaps that’s why his work had become, outside Catriona, so all-consuming in his life. There could be no guilt in that. It was something he had to do for both of them. It was how he could provide a carer for her. It was how he had been able to afford the alterations to the house that took her increasingly limited mobility into account as the disease progressed. It was how he had been able to promise her that she would remain in her own place to the very end.
Beyond Catriona and the university, his life had been, for a long time now, something that took place mainly inside his head. His life, too, had been paralysed in a mild way. He lived among endless circular thoughts that seemed incapable of finding their way through into action. What action? Catriona was there and she needed him more than any other demands on him that he could think of, even those that were born inside himself.
The thought did what such thoughts always did. It overcame his self-pity with the reality of Catriona’s vastly greater suffering. She was the only one of them who had any right to complain about life and she hadn’t done much of that, even when she’d had the means to. Perhaps she couldn’t afford to or she would have gone under more quickly. These days, he was largely guessing about what she felt.
He was wondering now. He put down his glass and went out into the hall. The railings there and the stair-lift attached to the wall struck him as poignant. They had been fitted at different stages of her deterioration. Now even they were useless except as milestones along a dark road she had gone alone.
At the door of the room he paused and listened. There wasn’t even the sound of breathing. He pushed the door open gently. Light filtering through the curtains reached as far as the bed she lay in. He crossed quietly and stood looking down at her.
For a moment he panicked. Then an expression – indicating what, he didn’t know – brushed her face as gently as a cobweb, stirred her features infinitesimally and left them. She was alive.
He watched her. In this flattering light and given the position of her head, the weight loss was somehow minimised. He saw her almost as she had been once. He remembered them making love and was glad he hadn’t been with anyone else since her illness had made them celibate. He knew the gladness had a doubtful basis, was another of those expressions in his life whose meaning he wasn’t sure of. Was it the result of noble self-denial or a lack of sexual drive? He felt the gladness anyway. Perhaps even the gift she was unaware of was still a gift, futile yet an expression of love, like flowers laid at the grave of one of the dead.
Watching her, he felt anew the injustice of what had happened to her. The innocence of her face was no illusion. He had once told her that it took her about three weeks to work out that somebody was being nasty to her, so alien to her was such treatment of others. What had she done to deserve this? Well, at least he knew it couldn’t be too long now.
On that casual day in the kitchen she had begun a life sentence for which there was to be no remission but death. He should complain? He had been no more than a conscientious visitor to her prison.
Nothing he had done entitled him even to believe that he could effectively imagine the refined complexities of her suffering: learning to live within ever narrowing physical limits, so that each agonising adjustment of the spirit was merely a rehearsal for an even more brutal one, and then another; having your sight progressively blurred and your speech progressively muffled little by little; knowing yourself receding gradually behind thicker and thicker walls of silence and stillness and darkness.
He would have kissed her, except that he knew she could have no greater happiness in her life now than sleep, so he gave her the gift of not touching her. He crossed the room, pulled the door to and came downstairs.
The sense of what she had endured and how she had endured it chastened him. He would have his weekend, which she wouldn’t have grudged him, and come back to look after her in the evenings. It had been arranged that Mhairi would stay with her till Sunday. She would soon be here. He would have a quick shower and be ready for the changing of the guard. But first he should give Harry Beck the wake-up call he had asked for. He stood in the hall.
He regretted again that he could never remember phone numbers. He went through to the sitting-room and found the list of people going on the trip. He lifted the phone and dialled. He listened to the relentlessness of the tone drilling into the strangeness of another life.
Someone or something was burrowing towards him. He seemed to be buried alive. He didn’t want to be reached. But his hand had already taken hold on another world before he was fully awake.
‘Yes?’
