intense. She liked that.
‘Anyway,’ the one called John said. ‘Then we started on the champagne. And it was Moët. That was a party.’
She watched him cross to the table and mix himself a drink. Whisky and water he took. Dan Galbraith called to him and he went over and sat on the floor beside Dan’s chair, leaning his back against the wall. She enjoyed the way he moved. She wondered what they were talking about.
‘I need a bit of company tonight,’ Dan was saying. ‘I don’t want to go into my fifties alone.’
‘You’ve got plenty of that, then.’
‘I don’t know about Sylvia’s insistence on the long dresses, though. A bit formal, isn’t it?’
‘I like it. I like seeing women like that. I don’t know. It makes me imagine a more romantic time. Fin de siècle or something. End of the nineteenth century.’
‘In a way it’s quite a good wake, I suppose,’ Dan said. ‘Burying your forties. That was a nice funeral oration you gave.’
‘It was meant to be about the future as well as the past.’
‘I know, I know. It’s all right for you. You’ve still got most of your forties to come,’ Dan said.
‘Uh-huh. But what am I doing with them?’
It was a remark thrown out casually that came back to attack him. He was mugged by his own question. While Dan reminisced gently, he found himself trapped among thoughts the question had released in him. His part in the conversation became mainly nods and vague sounds of assent.
What was he doing with his forties? He sometimes felt his nature was a beast he hadn’t learned to domesticate. It did what it wanted rather than what he tried to train it to do.
‘Remember the party we had when your first novel came out,’ Dan said. ‘That was an event.’
‘It was.’
And thanks for giving me a memory I don’t need at the moment. How many years ago was that? Fifteen? Sixteen? It was in a wine bar which had since disappeared. Passing the place where it used to be, he sometimes wondered if he had dreamed it. It was a Pizzaland now. He certainly seemed to have dreamed the possibilities with which he had sensed the place shimmering that evening.
Lodgings in Eden had been out for three weeks then. He had decided to wait before having the party in case the book sank without trace and people wouldn’t know what they were supposed to be celebrating. But all the reviews that were in had been good. The book had reached number nine in a bestseller list. Since he had never again appeared on any such list, he had, of course, realised that they were things of no serious significance. But then that entry at nine had seemed an omen of a bright future.
So many other things that evening had supported the feeling. He was standing among a lot of people who were happy for him and wishing him well. He was twenty-eight. He had already written a book that he was entitled to call, however briefly, a bestseller. Maggi was still with him and they had plans to choose somewhere to live where she could take a job teaching and he could write his next book. The publishers were happy and waiting for it. He had ideas for evermore. If this was what he could achieve at the first attempt, what might he be able to do over the next few years?
Not a lot, as it transpired. He still couldn’t understand it. How had something as solid as that moment turned into a mirage? Perhaps the first thing he had done wrong was to work so hard on the second novel. Perhaps success, like some women, is turned off by being courted too abjectly. It took six years for him to deliver Winter in August. When it was finally published, it felt like his second first novel, so long had it come after Lodgings in Eden. It emerged to a thunderous silence. Something in him died with the book.
His confidence was broken. It was as if another Columbus had set out to discover new worlds and landed on Rockall. The bleakness of where he found himself spread like a blight into the lives around him. He didn’t blame Maggi for leaving him. If he could have found the way to do it, he would have parted with himself. He made a half-hearted attempt at it by leaving Skye and coming back to Glasgow. But he brought his dead ambition with him, like a corpse in a suitcase. He unpacked it with his clothes and had sat staring at it for years, willing it to breathe again.
But the book of short stories he had published five years later merely reaffirmed where he thought he was – trapped in a fantasy of his own making. They could have sold more copies of In Places at the Time if he had gone round the houses with them. He almost did.
He knew his reaction to his own failure was exaggerated but he couldn’t control it. Since his teens he had invested almost all his hopes in being a writer, and the high of his brief initial success had been so intense that he couldn’t adjust to the experience of coming down. He seemed to have spent the time since the failure of Winter in August in a kind of unsuccessful psychological rehab. Even sitting here with Dan Galbraith, he still couldn’t believe that what he had thought was an infinity of promise had contracted by now to waiting for a letter, which still hadn’t come. His future, he was thinking, had reduced itself to the contents of an envelope.
‘Sometimes,’ Dan was saying, ‘I wish I had achieved half of what you have.’
‘Do yourself a favour,’ he said. ‘Don’t.’
‘You’ve written something,’ Dan said. ‘Me? I’ve reached the dizzy heights of being a sub-editor. Your books’ll be there when you’ve gone.’
Where would they be? Recycled into toilet-tissue? If they survived, they would be like some of the more egregious tombstones you sometimes saw in cemeteries – proclaiming not the importance of the people who lay under them, just their misguided sense of that importance. And very seldom read.
The truth, he realised again, was that other people’s assumptions about his success were, in a strange way, what hurt him most of all. They were such a contradiction of what he felt was the truth about himself that they made a performance of much of his life. He sometimes felt he was going around pretending to be somebody else.
Even his invitation to come here tonight had been partly related to the mistaken sense of him that people had when they knew of the books. He had been friendly with Dan for years and he would have been glad to come anyway. But he was also aware that Dan had been especially keen for him to be there because he was the nearest thing Dan could get to a half-baked local celebrity. Hence the speech. It was the equivalent of getting somebody who was known slightly for being known slightly to cut the ribbon at the opening of the supermarket.
‘And what have I achieved?’ Dan was saying.
He looked round the tastefully furnished room, saw the attractiveness of Dan’s wife and two daughters.
‘Look around you,’ he said.
‘I know, I know,’ Dan said. ‘I’m grateful for what I’ve got. I’m very proud of my family. But all I’ve managed to be is a sub-editor on a paper. I still envy you the legacy of words you’re leaving.’
Some bequest to the nation, he was thinking. Still, maybe they could use it as a warning to others on the folly of misguided ambition. He heard fake laughter somewhere, not so much a laugh as a shout with bells on.
He traced it to the man who had come in with her. He was sitting in a chair, gesticulating
