A Gift from Nessus - William McIlvanney

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were improvising themselves in his head. Brush my shoes. Stand on your head in the corner. He decided to halt on the verge of megalomania. He might just be suffering from overwork. After all, what signs had she given? Also, there was an uneasy ambiguity about who was the ringmaster in this subtle circus. He wasn’t sure whether he held the whip or responded to it, for he couldn’t take his eyes off her. One thing he hated was to let other people get the upper hand. This was enough for one performance.

      ‘All right, Annette,’ he said. ‘Thanks. You can knock off now.’

      ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Mr Morton.’ She invested the words with a lot of weight, like a walk-on actress trying to make her name on the strength of a line. ‘Goodbye,’ pouting on the plosive, as if she was extinguishing a delicate candle.

      ’Night,’ Morton called, the unnecessary volume of his voice seeming to intimate the distance she should have been from him. But his mind noted her departing buttocks like a memorandum.

      Only one conclusion to be reached. He glanced at the file again. It was ludicrously obvious that Cameron was at it. A fiddle was one thing, but this lot amounted to an orchestra. Morton didn’t want to do anything too drastic. For old time’s sake, he thought. And other things. But there was this additional information. Margaret Sutton. You couldn’t expect to run a mistress on expenses. No. Steps would have to be taken.

      Morton flipped the file shut and locked it in the right-hand drawer of his desk. Having decided to act, he felt better. It was now only a question of how, and Morton was good at the mechanics of a situation. He lit a cigarette. He was seeing Cameron tonight. But their wives would be there, as well as Jim Forbes and his wife. (Morton’s mind donated a smile like a penny to the image the name of Forbes always called up to him.) He decided he would merely mention to Cameron that he wanted to see him in his office first thing in the morning. Give him some doubt to sip on overnight, like black coffee.

      Morton stood as still as bronze in the middle of the office and listened. He relished this moment of soft limbo when the office-building ceased to be a factory of noises and addressed itself to murmured sounds, muted as prayers. The clank of a pail, melted by distance to a coin of sound dropped into a large silence; the closing of a door, a small hardness that healed in a second; footsteps like a message in morse; the preoccupied moan of the lift complaining to itself; all sounds that were movingly self-absorbed, confined to the confessional of their private purpose. In the glare of his small linoleum sanctum, Morton smiled self-sufficiently and to himself, graven out of his own preoccupations, wreathing smoke down his nostrils like a lonely bull that manufactures its own incense.

      The small cubicle adjoining his office contained a wash-hand-basin and a rack where his coat and hat hung. He washed his hands slowly and the question of how Allison Cameron would react if she knew became involved with the suds. He kneaded the issue to the point of her forced moral indignation and then washed it down the sink.

      At the door of the office, he paused with his coat on, looking round. All was in order. The office looked small with familiarity and Morton felt he had all but outgrown it. He noted in the general drabness the small prophetic pockets of luxury – oriental letter-opener, expensive desk-lighter. London was next. The future lay like tracks towards it. Suddenly Cameron clicked in his mind like a signal standing against him. Morton resolved in that second that Cameron would give neither him nor the company one more day’s trouble. He would bring him out into the open. Softly, wisping up out of dim Glasgow backstreets where children stuck like flies to a lamp-post that dropped a grey bell of light over them, threaded with memories of endless games of tig and scuffed shoes and tin-can football and snot-hardened jersey-cuffs, came the words of a game they used to play: ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are, the game’s abogey’. Morton nodded in answer to their echo, closing the door.

      3

      Although the fog might have seemed an adequate safeguard in itself, Cameron adhered scrupulously to the complicated rules he had evolved for visiting Margaret’s flat. This evening, as always, he parked the car a couple of streets away from where Margaret lived, but not in the same place as he had left it the time before. He had four habitual parking spots and he permutated them moodily. Having locked the car, he went in the opposite direction from his destination.

      It was a compulsive performance with him and, like most rites, was not quite rational. The dread of leaving the car two nights running in the one place had the strength of a taboo over him, as if such carelessness would bring discovery inevitably upon him. And the erratic course he took towards Margaret’s flat was not designed simply to foil the rubber soles of followers or elude the eyes of passers-by. For him it had almost the power of a spell, woven by his own feet, and proof against more than mere people. It was as if by pacing out a deliberately devious route he could shake off his sense of guilt, give his own conscience the slip, and create a charmed context for his meeting with Margaret, a private room that excluded the fears that scuttled in the cupboards of his mind, the shame that snuffled to get at him in his sleep. This evening especially he needed such a secret place to be, a shelter from drab realities.

      The fog did its best to countermand the hardness of the truth, touching the gaunt dullness of the buildings with a brief, grey mystery. Cameron was glad of it, although he knew what lay beneath it well enough. This part of Glasgow was tucked and folded in his heart like a map of himself. Since he had known Margaret, it had taken hold of him with that relentlessness places have. Pointless images from it formed insistent lumber in his memory – the house in the corner sporting the potted plant whose leaves reached wanly after growth that never came; the newsagent’s window where handwritten postcards advertising rooms made illegible offers in the rain. That grubby plexus of streets formed a knot that tied him somehow to himself, meant more than masonry, so that sometimes in a dream he was running down one of those streets away from something, but found that one street doubled back endlessly into another, while around him rose the familiar tall black buildings where the starlings alighted to defecate in cheeky insult to the architecture.

      But tonight the fog helped him to generate the atmosphere he wanted, neutralising time and place. He was amoeba swimming through a grey infinity. For the time that he was with Margaret, there would only be two people in a room and nothing else would matter. Someone lurched past him greyly, drowning in his own dream.

      The light in the entry burned stale on the dank walls. As soon as Cameron’s foot clanged on the cold stone floor, the small dream he was nurturing died on him. This dim corridor admitted no deviation from the fact itself, led to nothing more than the bleak stairway at the end of it. On the two doors he passed, unknown names were dissolving in polished brass.

      Margaret lived in one of the top flats, three storeys up. The stairs had been hollowed down the middle by a river of feet, and greasespots showed here and there like domesticated bloodstains. Behind one of the doors as he went by, an argument raged faintly; the words, audible but incomprehensible, made small explosions of futility. He opened the door to Margaret’s flat with his key and went in.

      ‘Oh. Eddie. Hullo,’ she said.

      She was genuinely surprised to see him. Obviously she had assumed it was too late now for him to come today. There was a pile of jotters on the arm of her chair and she had a red pen in her hand, marking. She must have taken a very early tea. Cameron was embarrassed to see the tea-dishes still on the table and the fire not cleaned out, grey ash showing round the edges of the electric heater she had placed in the hearth. All that sloppiness was somehow like advertising her loneliness, seemed to be saying: See, nobody cares. She hadn’t even drawn the curtains.

      ‘I can’t wait long,’ Cameron said.

      At once he was angry with himself for saying that. It was unnecessarily brutal, so much more clumsy than the deft scene of mutual seduction that he had imagined. Margaret said nothing but her eyes were a reprimand he could hardly bear, like small wounds. Within himself he felt a response stir like a small haemorrhage, and the thing that bled in him was a complex tissue of shame and lust and hunger and pity.

      ‘I’ve just been doing some correction.’

      Margaret put the words between them like a screen until she could find herself,

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