Remedy is None (18 page)

He clapped his hands like a Grand Vizier and Jim went into his own version of an eastern dance, swivelling his hips and peering enticingly over his down turned hands.

‘Behold,’ intoned Charlie. ‘We know of a place, O Great One, where the V.P. flows like wine and the women are soft and yielding to the touch. Umpteen of them. Yea, a veritable harem.’

‘And each of them partial to a wee bit harum-scarum,’ leered Jim, dancing over to nudge Charlie.

‘There are all things for a man’s delight. Women beauteous as the dawn.’

‘And game as they come.’

‘Unlimited supplies of the sacred weed.’

‘An’ ye get free fags as well.’

‘Sweet music.’

‘The pick of the pops and the popsies. Can you beat it?’

‘Whit he means is we’ve been invited tae a pairty,’ Jim explained.

‘My crude compatriot would make a fairy-tale sound like a shopping list. But Ah suppose ye could put it that way. An’ not only that. But by public demand you are invited also as well. So get on yer hunting hat and let’s go.’

‘Naw, no’ me,’ Charlie said. ‘Ah’m no in the mood, Andy. Ye can tell me about it.’

‘Let us not talk mutiny, Charles,’ Jim said. ‘Since when did crumpet become a matter of mood. It’s a matter of principle man. We have an obligation to our fans. Are ye goin’ tae let all these women go to waste? Think of your responsibilities.’

‘Ah’ll let you worry about that, Jim. Ah know ye’ve got a fine sense of public duty. Whose pairty is it, anyway?’

‘Eddie Gibson’s,’ Andy said. ‘His folks’re away for a weekend somewhere. So Eddie’s got the fambly mansion to himself. It’s quite a house too. Plenty o’ rooms tae get lost in.’Jim
interpolated caddish laughter. ‘And he has invited a formidable array of cuff. Everything’s laid on, man. Booze. Talent. Record-player. Snuggery with room for as many couples as you care to mention. What a set-up, Charlie. Carpets will be rolled up and hair will be let down. Morals will be left at the door. Trousers optional. Cost of admission: one bottle of nothing in particular. Cold tea, if you’re stuck. How can ye refuse, man? How can ye refuse?’

‘You canny, Charlie,’ Jim said. ‘You just canny. How can ye sit here in preference to that? It’s like turning down Hawaii for a week-end in Arran.’

‘Aye, just you wade in there then, Jim,’ Charlie said. ‘An’ good fishing. But it’s no’ for me. The way Ah feel the noo, Ah don’t think Ah could muster enough patter tae last me through a sentence. Ah just don’t feel like all that merry chiff-chaff an’ casual talk.’

‘Who said anything about talk?’ Andy’s hands spread in appeal. ‘If it’s taciturn you feel, that’s the way you play it, boy. Tight as a clam. A man of mystery. Ah can just see it. Ye come in wi’ a fag hangin’ out yer mouth. Ye give the company a friendly sneer. All eyes are on you. Then it’s just a matter of pickin’ out the one ye fancy an’ noddin’ towards the bedroom. It always works in the pictures.’

‘No’ in the ones Ah’ve seen. Naw, thanks all the same, boys. But Ah’d feel like the proverbial spare one at a wedding. You go an’ have a few for me.’

‘Now, now,’ Jim said in a tone of brusque competence. ‘Just a minute.’

He made a great show of restraining Andy, took out an invisible stethoscope and proceeded to sound Charlie methodically.

‘Hm. Uh-huh.’ He nodded sagely to himself.

‘Just as I thought. The so-and-so’s deid.’

‘I demand a second opinion,’ Charlie said.

‘All right then.’ Andy supplied it. ‘Ye’re damn near deid. But we’re givin’ ye a chance tae get back to life. Lazarus, I say, git up off yer hunkers an’ walk. With us down to this place
here an’ see whit life really is. Come on, Charlie. Whit dae ye say?’

‘Ach, Ah’d just be a drag on the rations, Andy.’

‘Such modesty,’ Jim said. ‘Listen, friend. Nobody who brings a bottle with him is ever a drag on the rations. Anyway if ye just leave one o’ yer heads at the door, nobody’ll be any the wiser. An’ ye can tuck that third leg o’ yours out of sight. An’ as for yer leprosy, Ah’ve told ye often enough before – whit’s that among friends?’

‘Ye know, Jim,’ Andy said, ‘Ah don’t think this man fully appreciates yet the chance he’s getting. Do ye know some of the people who’re going to be there?’

Andy proceeded to rhyme off a series of girls’ names, accompanying each with a brief biographical note, touching upon appearance, past history, and potential. Charlie listened amusedly. He wasn’t unwilling to be persuaded. Already he had fallen into the same idiom as Andy and Jim, feeling again its old familiarity. It was reassuring just to listen to them and to fall in with their mood, to concern yourself with football matches and parties and girls without worrying too much about anything. In this company Charlie could almost believe that the only thing that was wrong with him was that he had lost touch with these casual aspects of his life, and that this loss was the cause and not a symptom of the way he felt. And after all, you needed these trivial concerns, these parts of your life that you could take for granted and be jocular about. They were the essential ballast of your everyday life that kept you sane, saved you from becoming too introvert. This was the law of levity that governed your existence.

‘There you are then, Charlie,’ Andy said. ‘The riches of the Indies. At your disposal. Just stretch out yer hand, man. And watch ye don’t get it cut off. Or better still, just get yer jacket on and come down with us.’

‘Ah must admit Ah’m tempted, boys,’ Charlie said uncertainly. ‘But Ah don’t know.’

For the first time for a while Charlie seemed to see light at the end of the dark warren of circuitous thought in which he
had lost himself since his father’s death. He relished the prospect of going out with Andy and Jim. For the moment everything suddenly seemed simplified and he could not readily bring to mind the reasons for not going with them, except that in the past weeks impassivity and isolation had become almost habitual with him. And it was this instinct which now made him reluctant to be ferreted out of his inactivity.

‘What gives with ye, Charlie?’ Jim was obviously baffled. ‘Ye’re no’ still goin’ wi’ Mary, are ye? Ah thought Ah’d heard . . .’

‘Naw, naw,’ Charlie helped him out. ‘We packed it in. The other week there.’

‘Do I detect the rattle of a broken heart, fond lover?’

‘Ye’ll detect a rattle on the side of the heid just directly,’ Charlie said. ‘Naw, Ah think Ah’ll survive.’

‘No’ at this rate ye’ll no’.’ Andy shook his head gravely. ‘Speaking in my professional capacity as your physician, Sir Charles, I must warn you of the danger of letting your fractured ego set in its present position. I recommend strenuous exercise of the libido.’

‘Come on, Charlie,’ Jim said. ‘Don’t let it get you. It happens to everybody. Come on out and forget it.’

That was all Charlie needed to sway him. By the easy way in which they categorized his feelings, they made it seem perfectly normal, a commonplace state of mind. He was the traditional disappointed lover, trying to forget his disappointment. He had a convenient peg on which to hang his troubles for the moment, leaving him free to enjoy the evening for its own sake.

‘Fair enough, then,’ he said. ‘But Ah’d have to change an’ give maself a shave.’

‘Well, it’ll be a come-as-you-please sort of caper, Ah fancy,’ Andy said. ‘But suit yourself.’

Charlie went through to the kitchen and put on a kettle. He washed and shaved carefully, going through all the familiar actions like a ritual that evoked his old self. Everything he did seemed to normalize the situation further. He savoured
the cool contact of the clean white shirt against his skin, chose his tie as carefully as a politician chooses his policy, and then spent time on the exact tying of it, as if he was putting the knot on his rediscovered assurance. He did it all methodically and deftly, feeling himself firmly buckled in the armour of normalcy.

Left in the living-room together, Andy and Jim exchanged a significant glance like a password. Jim gave a congratulatory wink that included both of them. He lifted a newspaper and spoke from behind it in low tones in case Charlie should come in.

‘Ay, Charlie’s no’ that far gone, anyway,’ he said, ‘that he canny hear the call of the crumpet.’

‘But just take it easy,’ Andy said. ‘Let’s not push our luck. Phase Two doesn’t come into operation until we’ve all had a wee bit drink. Fair enough?’

‘Roger. Over and out,’Jim said. ‘Here. When did Charlie say Elizabeth and her boy friend would be in from the pictures? It’s nearly half-six the noo.’

‘Well, they went to the late afternoon house. Probably no’ be in till after seven.’

‘By which time the birds will have flew. We’ll nip down to Gowdie’s and have a few jugs of aphrodisiac. Hey, Charlie. Get a jildy on man. There’ll no’ be a virgin left.’

Chapter 15

GOWDIE
’
S WAS A BIG PLAGE, A SORT OF ARCHITECTURAL
Siamese twin. The bar, where Charlie and Andy and Jim were, was the original building, but with the shift of the social bias towards the acceptance of women drinkers, it had grown a more refined extension. Gowdie had bought out the seed-store next door and now it blossomed with plush furniture and bright fittings. The large cocktail lounge was Gowdie’s ambush laid for the latest clientele, a conspiracy of soft lights and tasteful decor. Lush leather chairs beckoned the more bureaucratic bums, wooed the soft flanks of women in smart suits, whose rings flashed casual wealth as they lifted long-stemmed glasses in the amber glow of wall-lights. Fish swam back and forth along the walls in the inset aquaria, weaving through pseudo seaweed, looking phantasmal and goggle-eyed through the coloured glass. Waiters in smart white jackets bent politely towards men who ordered particular brands of particular drinks. The lounge was connoisseur country where men were impressive and women were impressed, and didn’t need a purse. Voices were seldom raised, unless the remark was clever. The small groups talked together quietly and drinks were incidental to other things. A hand would touch a knee. Two heads would come close. These activities continued suavely and restrainedly, oblivious to the rowdier enjoyment in the bar, except that occasionally the sliding-door to the latter regions would be pushed open, and someone would head for the lounge toilet with the polite ‘Excuse me. But they’re queuin’ up through-bye.’

The bar itself had undergone some modification due to its offshoot, so that its old robust identity was somewhat compromised. Patrons swore in a lower key. New formica tables had been introduced to various parts of the room, making it
look like the lounge’s poor relation. They had installed a television set in which grey figures gestured mutely behind a barricade of beery voices. The dart board had been relegated to a symbolically tight corner, just one remove from the window. And behind the extended bar was displayed a new cosmopolitan hierarchy of exotic drinks, venerable whiskies of ancient ancestry standing beside parvenu vodkas and alien brandies, while the wines and liqueurs ranged above them jostled for precedence. But most of these drinks were for transportation to the lounge. In the bar the most popular drink was still, as it had always been, the draught beer, pulled up manfully on the pumps in cloudy pints. It imparted to *hose who drank it its ancient secret brand of expletive philosophy and wet-mouthed argument, so that the bar still retained some of its old earthy vigour.

And this was especially true at week-ends. During the rest of the week, the lounge seemed to succeed in imposing its atmosphere of restraint upon the bar. But on Fridays and Saturdays, the air was so laden with exhaled spirits, alcoholic and merely human, was so thick with the smoke of cigarettes and obscure argument, that nothing could have properly subdued it, not even the presence of Gowdie himself. And on such nights Gowdie was not anxious to subdue it. Gowdie was a big-boned and bluff man, body and limbs put together roughly in powerful slabs. He was by nature choleric. The air of camaraderie he assumed was strictly professional, as formal as a buttonhole and liable to wilt at the first whiff of trouble. He measured people according to their pockets. You rated as high with him as your rate of exchange and your friendship ended with your money. But on this night, since it was Saturday, the spendthrift of the week, three figures in the credit column, he was playing mine jovial host, hail-fellow-well-spent, and his laughter rang out regularly like a cash register. He walked amiably about the place, dropping remarks like receipts on this group and that, supervising expenditure, and keeping an eye to the waiters who scurried back and forth to the lounge with trays that brimmed with liquid money.

His face clenched as if he was wrestling with a thrombosis when a young man stood up suddenly in the path of one of these waiters and nearly spilled a couple of quid on to the floor.

‘Ah’m sorry, Mac,’Jim said to the waiter. ‘Ah nearly made ye swallow yer tray.’

The waiter nodded brusquely and went past. Gowdie’s face relaxed into a spurious smile.

‘Ah better watch that,’Jim said to Charlie and Andy. ‘That stuff’s too valuable to baptize the floor wi’. Well then, gents? Same again?’

‘Thanks, Jim,’ Charlie said.

‘Wait a minute now,’ Andy said. ‘Ah’m thinking we’ll be after haffing a drap o’ the dimple forbye, Jamie my lad. Just for to whet whur whistles, you understand.’

‘Aye,’ said Jim. ‘An’ I’m thinking you’ll be after halfing me with the bill, Andrew my friend.’

‘All right, all right.’ Andy dropped his Highland accent under pressure. ‘Three doubles an’ we’ll split the damage.’ Jim returned with the whiskies in a few moments, but had to go back to supervise the drawing of the pints.

Charlie drank off what was left of his pint and gave the glass to Jim to take back with him. The beer was winning all right. The first couple of pints had seemed to be absorbed almost at once into his porous sadness. But now his thoughts were beginning to drift aimlessly in a gentle wash of beer, tugged lazily back and forth by the talk of Andy and Jim and the other activities in the bar. He was seeing things with a cool and casual clarity, and his mind was lazily treading water like a swimmer in a sheltered moonlit bay where every landmark is familiar and the winking lights ashore are each one known to him and signal that he is safe. He saw Gowdie, a constant presence in the bar, his attention sweeping the room at regular intervals like a lighthouse beam. He saw Jim easing his way towards them, holding aloft two pints.