LITMIR.BIZ

      6

      Cameron knew that Allison was going to quarrel with him. Although she was in the kitchen and he stood in the living-room, the fact transmitted itself with absolute clarity. Roger. Over and out. He accepted it with tired resignation, not even bothering to wonder why. Obviously he had once again said or done something that offended Allison’s delicate code of hypocrisy. It was one of those things you couldn’t escape.

      You could postpone it, though. He lit a cigarette, moving slowly about the room to gather up the debris of empty coffee-cups and sticky glasses. Bring out your dead, he thought, heaping them carelessly on the tray he had brought from the kitchen. They made a sad, cluttered little still life, and he sat down in front of it as if it was a shrine, smoking. What a waste of a night! They should give lessons, the lot of them. How to kill your nights stone dead. How to talk without saying anything. Bore life into submission. Cameron’s Simplified Course in Catalepsy. Instant futility. He had a quiet moment of panic wondering if it was scientifically true that each night dedicated to being nobody in particular meant that there was less of you to be realised in the future.

      He felt an urge to make some grand gesture of purification. Instead, he rose and emptied the ashtray into the fire. There were no large actions available to him, he reflected. Necessity lay on him like handcuffs, curtailing every sweeping movement to a tic. He was the servant to his own life. Throwing his cigarette in the fire, he lifted the tray and carried it through to the kitchen like a waiter.

      ‘Nice of you to look in,’ Allison said, standing rubber-gloved like a surgeon by the sink.

      Cameron let the remark pass. It was just a scalpel-sharpener. He unloaded his cargo on the draining-board, wiped the tray, and selected one of the left-over petit-fours. As he bit it, the clove in the centre prickled like a disturbed hedgehog, stinging his mouth. He grabbed a handy bottle of milk and drank from it.

      ‘Oh please!’ Allison said as she submerged the dishes in water.

      Cameron saw that there was no way to avoid the quarrel. He hated these trip-wire situations that Allison rigged up, where no matter what you did or said, there had to be an explosion. But this was to be one of them, and he consciously donned indifference like a steel helmet.

      ‘Must you be so crude?’ she persisted.

      ‘When you’re putting out a fire, you don’t worry about the etiquette of hose-holding. That’s what you call an aphorism.’

      Allison smiled, her teeth showing like a row of icicles.

      ‘Clever,’ she said. ‘You’re very clever for a boor. Did you have to drink it out of the bottle?’

      ‘Well, it’s handier than an udder, isn’t it?’

      ‘I don’t suppose you’d ever think of cups? That’s what they’re for, you know.’

      ‘Is it really? Judging by the brew you put in them, I always thought they were for holding specimens of urine.’

      ‘You are utterly disgusting.’

      Let this chalice be taken from my lips, Cameron prayed irreverently. Let this stop at the preliminary exchanges. But at the same time he felt his own bitterness and malice gather on his tongue, as potent as anything she could give him. He lifted the dishcloth and started to dry the dishes.

      ‘You’re so boorish you would be black-balled from Old Macdonald’s farm.’

      That was an insult a la carte, speciality of the house, and Cameron answered in kind.

      ‘Any moment now,’ he answered, ‘you are due to announce for the umpteen-millionth time that you went to a finishing school. Which is a good name for it. They certainly finished you. Sent you out with a hermetically sealed head.’

      ‘If I have said it before, it’s only because it’s true. I did go to a finishing school.’

      ‘Tell me. I’m really interested. What do they do in a finishing school? What did they do at your finishing school? Teach you to say ‘It’s a nice day’ in half-a-dozen languages? So that you could become an all-round, cosmopolitan idiot? How to curtsey without showing your knickers? Have classes in tea-cup-holding? I bet you passed “magna cum laude” in pinky-sticking-out.’

      ‘At least they taught us how to conduct ourselves decently in the company of other human beings. That’s something you’ve never learned. Look at what happened tonight.’

      This was it. The rest had only been range-finders. Now the real reasons for the quarrel were about to be brought into play. They would be of no consequence, he decided, but he retracted a little inside himself just the same. Nobody is ever immune to the criticism of others. Cameron slowly polished a coffee-cup dry, making a dugout of the action.

      ‘You were so rude to Sid and Elspeth. Don’t you realise he’s your boss?’

      ‘I should. The way he keeps striking matches on my forehead. And using my breast-pocket as an ashtray.’

      ‘He’s the very man who could help you to make something out of yourself.’

      ‘What he wants to make out of me, you could make out of a Woolworth’s plastic kit and a tube of glue.’

      Allison was washing the same cup over and over again as if it was Cameron’s brain.

      ‘You’re so stupid for yourself, I can hardly believe it. Why can’t you be nicer to people who matter?’

      ‘Next time I’ll unroll at the door and he can walk all over me.’

      ‘You’ll never be anything. Never. Not until you learn to cultivate the right friends.’

      ‘I’ll never be anything. Period. Look, Allison. For God’s sake put a match to your dreams of having married Charles Clore, heavily disguised as me. I’m not disguised as a bum. I am a bum. In terms of business, I’ll never be more than a tea-boy. Let’s face it now. For a time, I could make a show of it. Getting mentioned in the magazine and what not. But we’re too old to kid ourselves. Me. I couldn’t sell pound notes at a shilling a time. So lay off it, will you?’

      Cameron parted the curtains and looked out of the window to meet his own reflection staring in, a taut and discontented ghost. All the houses within his vision were in darkness. Only Allison and he were still awake, guarding their enmities. Wake up, he wanted to shout. You’re in this too.

      ‘It’s so unnecessary to be like that. What does it achieve? “Rubbish!” you said. Even just the very fact that they’re your guests. That should’ve been enough.’

      The treadmill was turning, bringing them back to the same place. Cameron couldn’t see anything he could do about it.

      ‘They can have the use of my chairs. Borrow my ears. Drink my whisky. But my mouth’s my own.’

      ‘But more than that – he’s your boss. Have you no sense at all? He’s your boss.’

      ‘He’s also a conceited bigot. He’s also about as sensitive as cement. The way he talks and talks. He makes the pope seem diffident.’

      ‘Don’t run people down just because you can’t keep up with them. You’re a fine one to talk about Sid Morton. You’re just making excuses for yourself. It’s always the same.’

      Allison emptied the basin and peeled off her rubber

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