Remedy is None (23 page)

‘He must be in the toilet.’

‘Must be.’

They straggled towards the toilet. Andy pushed open the door. It was empty.

‘Somebody’s spewed their ring up,’ Jim observed.

‘Charlie!’ Andy shouted. ‘Heh, Charlie!’

Jim crossed over and began to pummel the door of the W.C.

‘Open up in the name of the law,’ he bellowed. ‘I have a warrant for your arrest. The crime is arson.’

Muffled oaths took place behind the door like underground explosions. The jacket hanging there was pushed aside and a face was pressed against the frosted glass, peppered with transparent boils. Jim’s face met it on the other side of the glass, peering in an attempt to identify it.

‘Father!’ Jim shouted, throwing up his arms. ‘I’ve found you at last.’

There was the sound of a bolt being drawn. The door was edged open. A leg appeared round it, the trousers precariously clutched above the knee. A face, red and angry, followed at a higher level.

‘Whit the hell dae ye think ye’re on, Jock?’

‘Now, now, sir. Address me through the chair. Ye’re out of ordure,’ Jim said and gave a stillborn cackle.

Then at once they were both shouting, ‘Charlie’. They came back out into the bar, still shouting. Others in the bar
turned to look at them. After watching them in amazement for a moment, a few others took up the cry in heavy irony, until soon almost everyone in the bar was shouting in mocking unison.

‘Charlie! Charlie!’ they chanted, a ludicrous chorus of loud and beery voices, while the pint still stood untouched on the counter. ‘Where are you, Charlie? Charlie! Charlie! Where are you?’

Chapter 18

HE WAS NOWHERE WHERE ANYONE COULD REACH HIM
It was as if an avalanche had happened in his mind and he was trapped inside himself. Beyond the impenetrable rubble were other people and their lives. But he could not pass through to them. He had to turn back alone and find his way.

His mind spun like a broken compass. The buildings rising sheer around him were no more than vague hieroglyphs to him, the dim configurations of his thinking. The traffic and passing people tore at his consciousness like burrs or thorns, and with everything that touched his senses he bled. He wandered aimlessly and his feet made a desert of every place he passed through. Despair was like the millennium in his mind, crowning time triumphant, so that everything came to him ground to anonymous dust that sifted aimlessly back and forth. The crowds moving in the streets were no more purposeful than blowing sand. Faces drifted past him like fallen leaves. Voices blew in gusts about his head, sounding hollow as sea-shells. He was surrounded by a trackless waste in which there was no landmark of himself. But above his barren consciousness protruded one thought like a stunted tree on an empty horizon. It lay on his mind as if it was the last thing that was left of himself, recalcitrant against oblivion, like a hollow skull beneath an empty sky. He wanted to look at his father’s grave. He wanted to go there and see the headstone that had been erected. Using that thought as a landmark, he started to move himself towards the graveyard as if it were his home. That one intention seemed all that was left of him and it pushed him on towards the grave as if he would find himself there.

His progress was blind and instinctive. He was not aware of
how the light and noise modified as he approached the outskirts, how country infiltrated gradually into town, how trees became more frequent, streets grew quieter, and the parentheses of darkness between the street-lamps lengthened. His hands slipped twice on the low moss-grown wall before he scaled it and dropped, his fall gagged by the green turf of a grave. The shock of his landing jarred his still senses into action for a moment, as a shaken watch may tick into life for a few seconds. It was long enough for him to observe the lighted window of the attendant’s house some fifty yards away, fenced in from the rest of the cemetery. The door opened, cutting a swathe of light out of the dark, and a misshapen ball bounced out into it, coming to rest as a dog sniffing the ground. A man appeared in the doorway, smoking a meditative cigarette. The dog wagged into the darkness. Some minutes passed like a cortege. The man took a few proprietary paces back and forth, looking around. Night watchman to the dead. Satisfied, he flicked the stub of his cigarette into the darkness. Ten o’clock and all’s well. As he turned back into the house, he whistled once, throwing the sound casually over his shoulder and pulling the dog in on it like a leash. The door banged shut.

Charlie stepped quietly on to the gravel path, like an uncertain thief who did not know what he was here to take. The moon disclosed a confused network of graves, a garden of tangled stone. Charlie moved among it, away from the lighted house. It was difficult to locate his father’s grave. Around him stone reared, blossoming into strange shapes in the moonlight. In many places stood pitchers draped with cloth. Miniature angels petitioned heaven, faces set in marble beatitude. Huge ornate stones dwarfed smaller ones, but signified the same. Above the earth vanity made its last flourish and individuality sought its final perpetuation in desperate stone. Beneath the earth were the impartial worms.

Charlie passed the shed where the workmen’s tools were kept. Outside it, a tap dripped water into a trough, near which stood a couple of lemonade bottles for carrying fresh
water to the vases on the graves. A waste-basket was stuffed with withered flowers that rustled and sighed sorrowfully in the wind.

Charlie continued to walk slowly round the graveyard, patient as a prayer-wheel, until his persistence was answered. He saw the place on the small hill where only grass grew and the ground was unbroken. He walked on a little way down the incline until he came to the first headstone. Crossing over the newly turfed ground, he bent down and struck a match. The headstone was small and simple, hewn carefully as it was from John’s small wages. In the momentary flare of the match, Charlie made out his father’s name and the two dates under it before the wind peremptorily drew the darkness over them again. So closely did the carvings on the stone coincide with Charlie’s mood that it was as if only his coming to this place had put them there, as if his journey had culminated in a profound revelation. For this was truly all they could give his father for epitaph. This was the ultimate meaning he had for them. Here was their final pronouncement on his father. And Charlie, like his father’s only prophet, felt that he alone could interpret the true meaning of these hieroglyphs. For him they were written in fire, illumined by his experience, their significance entrusted to him, as surely as the tablets had been to Moses on the mountain. He understood their meaning. For what had his father’s life been but a hyphen between two dates? It had no place or meaning in the life that went on outside these walls. They gave it no acknowledgement. For them it was a pointless parenthesis. That was the meaning of the hieroglyphs. But what was their commandment?

Charlie crouched huddled over the grave, a pilgrim at the end of a strange pilgrimage. His mind was unnaturally still. And his body, like a restless servant, occupied itself mechanically in taking out cigarettes and lighting one. The wind honed itself on his face, ruffling his hair, and he was as insensate to it as the marble around him, transfixed as if in some strange ritual. He crouched over the grave as if he could exorcize its contents and conjure the chiselled dead out of their stone.

His hand, abandoned by the mind, moved restlessly and nervously of its own accord, as if frightened by what was being devised for it. A finger tapped dementedly on his cigarette as if it were a morse key that spelt out S.O.S. S.O.S. S.O.S.

Chapter 19

THE MAIN STREET SHOWED SATURDAY NIGHT IN THE
last stages of decomposition. There were only a few twitching remains of the vitality that had been. The night had had its brief chronology. There had been the twilight time when the main street was suddenly in spate with people from the tributary lanes that led from the football ground until these washed home, leaving some isolated in picture queues that sifted grain by grain into cinemas, measuring time like an hourglass. There had been the dull flat time when newspaper-sellers shouted, melancholy as muezzins, and the streets were peopled strangely by those who followed private purposes. There had been the time when the steeples struck curfew for the prim, and the pubs scaled their drunks, spilling them bawdy and singing on the streets to trickle fitfully home to fireside philosophy and beery reminiscence. There had been the brief still time before the dance-halls launched their separate invasions of the young, and couples entered parks and shadowed places.

Now it was carrion time. The two cinemas on the main street were shuttered and dated for next week. A few papers and tickets littered the pavement like skeletal pleasure. The only people left were a few groups of young men, like pariahs, casually distributed at street corners, talking fast and interrupting each other, grabbing their share of what was left of Saturday. In the awning of shadow from a shop doorway a policeman stood, quietly smoking an illicit cigarette. In the empty bus-station a small capped man in wellingtons was hosing it out, oblivious of everything except the jet of water he controlled, holding the nozzle close into his side so that he looked like some monster of virility.

These activities gently ruffled the subconscious of the town
like an eyelid’s flicker in a sleeper’s face, and across them Charlie passed like a troubled moment in a dream. He had no consciousness of walking or of the physical presence of the town. His body inhabited a separate world that followed its own laws, so that his legs obeyed their nature and led him home, as a horse might return to its stable, dragging its dead master hooked in a stirrup. But within the body’s automatism he lived in another place, without geography, that could not take its identity from the town, that had no home. He was given over to a force that denied the demands of time and place, the ties of home, that took possession of him darkly and swallowed his personal identity. Alien, it did not correspond to anything around him, had no reflection there. It did not obey the cause and effect of ordinary feeling, was not provoked by anything around it. It did not partake of ordinary life, did not belong to the world where desire and fulfilment co-exist, where wishes presuppose the possibility of their accomplishment. It had no finite origin and no predestined end. Cause and result, beginning and end, were all alike nowhere, and it was here, having begot itself upon itself. It resided in him like a dark divinity of feeling, unrelated to the finite world, superseding his identity, supplanting his very self.

What was happening in Charlie was barely thought. He was not thinking of any particularity. He did not think of his father dead. He did not think of that bitter room, nor of his mother’s desertion, nor of Mary’s thumbscrew of sadness, nor of the girl laughing on the bed, nor of the fleeting faces in the pub, nor of the windy graveyard. All of these things he had taken into himself, had allowed them to take possession of him and convulse him, until they emitted him now into what he was, the result of their interaction upon him. They were not his thoughts. He had become their physical agent. A series of finite situations and thoughts and wonderings had so worked upon him that they had brought him to a state of mind beyond themselves, a consciousness that transcended finite reasons and intentions, existing in its own right.

As his body brought him nearer to the house, his mind was
not engaged in consecutive thought. The motive power of his brain had run to a halt. Reason had guttered, doused, gone out. Thoughts had stilled like icicles. In the void they had left, his consciousness was a slow vertigo, a gently rotating darkness whose blank progress insistently recorded a fixed point ahead like radar oscillations. The point was unseen, unknown, but it was towards this that the feeling in him moved and sought to come. Only this unseen point, whatever it was, mattered, and nothing else registered, so that the familiar markings of his route seemed to bring him on without his awareness. The car parked at the kerb outside the house went unnoticed by him, with its sleek outline and shining chrome and the small flag on the bonnet furled in midnight calm. The path led him up to the door with a key in the lock, and the key took his hand and turned and the house took him in.

He was alone in the hall, the bland darkness of which showed a scar of light along the bottom of the living-room door. He took off his coat and hung it up, making the familiar sounds with the precision of someone making flag-points on a map, charting his position in time and place. He handled his way from contact to contact across the hall, fingering for the little table until it found his hand. The darkness seemed to absorb movement like a porous surface. He tilted on the crutch of his hand upon the table as he untied his laces, which were damp and impacted with walking. His body maintained the steady ripple of these sounds and contacts like a rope running through his hands, leading him blindly. Like an experienced valet it performed its habitual tasks without prompting. His jacket slid from his shoulders and was held in his hand. Then suddenly the automatic actions of his body were interrupted by an unfamiliar sound, startling in its unexpectedness, a bright flare of conversation, the simultaneous sound of several voices. Without thought, without anticipation, he blundered towards the sound like a moth to light, and pushed open the door of the living-room.

The scene came to him fragmented, like a torn photograph.
There were Elizabeth and Harry, their faces made familiar in the turning of a head, nose, mouth and eyes sketched swiftly into the patterns he knew. Harry acknowledged him with a facial cliche of recognition. But made separate from them by unfamiliarity were two others, a man and woman. The man exuded well-being, was like an advertisement for success from the well-groomed hair to the dark suede shoes. He sat with one leg resting on his other knee in a posture of cultivated youthfulness. The grey hair that flecked his temples looked more an affectation than an effect of age, a decorative addition to his toilette. The left hand resting across his leg, blazoned with gold ring and wrist-watch, held a half-burned cigarette between well-manicured fingernails. His face, like a calendar someone has forgotten to change, still showed a smile that antedated Charlie’s entry. The woman at first glance seemed to come from a page of the same magazine. She wore a smart green fitting suit that carried on one lapel a glittering brooch like a badge of membership to an exclusive club. The total effect, upwards from the trim legs sheathed in nylon, coincided with that of the man, was one of the arrest of the years. The clothes covered her like preservatives, so that an immediate assessment of her age was difficult. But something distinguished her from uniformity with the man. There was a subtle diffidence in her appearance, as if all of her had not been able to subscribe to it fully, but part of her somehow remained aloof from it. It could be seen especially in the face, set in its frame of lacquered hair. It had been carefully made up, but behind the cosmetic mask of assurance the features were set in a habitual expression of uncertainty like a tic. And now, as Charlie looked at her, this tic became intensified. Her expression changed like a broken barometer, worry extinguishing an incipient smile, rue supplanting gladness, each returning to apprehension. It was this uncertainty that enabled Charlie to penetrate the smart appearance and see the person within it. The realization of who she was struck him with guilt, as if he had been betrayed into a moment of cerebral incest. And it made the two halves of the scene all the
more incompatible, especially since his understanding was obliged to link them in the improbable connection that the tea-things on the table meant that they had been having tea together. Elizabeth could not have been taking tea with her.