A Gift from Nessus - William McIlvanney

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both fell into his lap.

      After a while, he got out of the car and walked round in front of it, looking across the moor. The sunset had frozen. It seemed no darker now than it had been ten minutes ago. The daylight was distilled to a last pellucid essence except where dusk had gathered like a sediment in hollows. He stood miniscule against the moor and the sunset, feeling himself dwindle into the vast statement of earth and sky. He didn’t move, as if his stillness were a kind of camouflage, making him acceptable to the scene, giving him roots here.

      Closing his eyes, he was unaware of the van that pulled into the lay-by behind his own car. A young man stepped out and bent down over Cameron’s car before coming towards him. Cameron heard the crunching noise made by the young man’s feet on the whinstone chips, but had not deciphered the sound before he felt the fingers prod his shoulder.

      ‘Heh, you!’ Focusing on the sound, Cameron saw a faceful of anonymous anger. ‘Yes, you!’

      It was like opening a poison-pen letter. The hatred expressed in that face was addressed to him. There could be no doubt about that. But where it came from and why, he couldn’t understand.

      ‘Lay off. D’ye hear me?’

      Cameron had no reaction. The pure malice in the eyes transfixed him like a snake’s head, and he waited for more venom.

      ‘Lay off Margaret Sutton. For if you don’t, you’ll be the sorriest man in the world. I’m not the only one who knows. You’ll find that out.’

      Cameron felt his stomach keel. It wasn’t the threat. It was the knowledge others had of him. It was the thought that he existed in the minds of people he didn’t know. It was a primal dread, a sudden sickening sense that he could be destroyed in effigy by other people.

      ‘Cut it out, will you?’

      The young man seemed momentarily put out by his own change of tone. They both stood looking rather crestfallen, as if neither of them liked the script but they were stuck with it.

      ‘You better keep your trousers buttoned after this.’

      He turned and walked away. The crunching of his feet on the whinstones seemed the most truly irrevocable sound that Cameron had ever heard. As the van pulled out, the gears crashed like an omen.

      The moor seemed fouled by his presence. Walking awkwardly back to the car, as if any movement that was too quick would make him vomit, Cameron switched on his sidelights and drove out onto the road again. It was as if he was following the van at a pre-arranged distance, but they would meet at a common destination. Instinctively, he slowed down. He played a game that he had for making things seem less important. You pretended you were telling someone else about the incident, and you made it sound funny. ‘He went away as if he’d just brought the good news from Ghent to Aix,’ Cameron thought. And, ‘Anyway, I always use zip-fasteners.’ But it didn’t work. The whole thing felt about as funny as gangrene.

      At the outskirts of the city, a light fog was joining forces with the darkness. Cameron didn’t know whether to curse or welcome it. It made visibility poorer for him, but then it made it poorer for everybody else too. And at the moment, Cameron had a nightmarish feeling that the city teemed with people in mysterious conspiracy against him, a secret club, two of whose members he had just met. The young man at the lay-by had hinted at a bigger membership. Cameron might meet a third member anytime, anywhere, and not even know it. He drove carefully through the streets, wearing the fog like an alias.

      2

      It was hot in the office. Morton crossed to the window but didn’t open it, content merely to watch the people in the cold air outside and cool down by proxy. There was no more than a faint wash of fog, just enough to blur edges and make traffic and pedestrians move in a poetic greyness where the lamp-standards flowered gently. Nice, Morton thought, from his window in Olympus, a study in degrees of confusion. The general greyness was intensified wherever people moved, each one’s breath creating a private fog about his head. Having things to do, Morton took in the sensuous pleasure of the scene quickly, swallowed it like a pill. Then he crossed to the door, opened it, and spoke into the small outer office.

      ‘Annette. You can bring me in that file on Mr Cameron now.’

      He came back in and sat on the edge of his desk, adjusting his mind like a microscope with Cameron under it. But as soon as Annette entered the office, his concentration misted. It wasn’t just the smell of her, although her perfume, strong without being obtrusive, proclaimed her femininity in a whisper. It was more complex than that. Annette attracted indirectly, as a sort of emotional agent provocateur. Not particularly pretty, she managed to make prettiness seem a fortuitous accessory, like earrings. Wherever she moved among the men in the office, she created small skirmishes on the borders of their attention. Many a business-like thought had found itself dissipated by the rustle of her nylons, many a sombre decision had been ambushed by her scent. She had learned to live with the fact that she was proposition-prone, and spent her days pleasantly side-stepping careless hands and avoiding knees that seemed magnetically attracted to hers and innocently staring innuendoes into stone. Disillusioned juniors maintained that she was merely saving herself for lechers of more elevated rank.

      Morton wondered about it as he took the file from her. He thought there was a secret submissiveness about her that only needed the right password. But he hadn’t time to play at Ali Babas just now. He opened the file.

      ‘Tidy up a bit in here, Annette, will you? There’s a good girl. It needs a woman’s touch.’

      He wondered at once why he had said that. Certainly not because he wanted the office tidied. The simple statement, emerging without apparent reason, added a new dimension to the atmosphere in the room. Annette obeyed without comment, going through a ritual of shifting things about on his desk. Morton felt as if he had made a remark in code, the true significance of which only the two of them could have understood.

      Cameron’s file. Graph of one man’s deterioration. As the sales figures degenerated, the expenses increased, as if Cameron could compensate imaginatively for the shortcomings of reality. Morton shook his head. There was only one conclusion to be reached.

      ‘All right to put this stuff in the basket?’ Annette asked.

      ‘What’s that?’

      She came round beside him and held the papers in front of him while he riffled through them. He was more conscious of the fine white hairs on her arm than of the writing on the papers. The shape of her bosom affected him like an astigmatism.

      ‘Okay,’ he said, not sure himself whether he was passing judgment on the contents of the papers or the contents of Annette’s blouse, and he watched her cross to the wastebasket.

      There was only one conclusion to be reached. He couldn’t help wondering about Annette, though.

      ‘These ones here, Annette. Put them in the left-hand drawer.’

      Although he wasn’t in her way, he made a show of moving to let her pass, settling nearer to her than he had been. She was in no hurry to move away, tapping the edges of the sheets of paper on the desk-top.

      ‘A second,’ while his hand rested on her forearm. In leaning over to see the top sheet, he felt her hair brush his cheek. Her skin against the blouse sighed infinitesimally, as if deputizing for an emotion. His fingers made a small gesture of contraction on her arm. ‘Yes. They’re the ones,’ leaving pale fingermarks like a rubber-stamp on her flesh.

      Only one conclusion to be reached, his mind repeated to him like a patient secretary. But duty came to him as his mother’s voice had through countless dusks when he had been involved in timeless games, distant and unreal. This was becoming an absorbing game. Annette, with the drawer closed, wasn’t so much standing as hanging, marionette on loose threads.

      ‘You could empty the ashtray if you’ve time.’

      It was so ridiculous he almost laughed, but she did it. For a manic moment, he had a wild spatial sense that this room had broken off from everything else, was spinning

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