Weekend

William McIlvanney

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782111962
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

An "illuminating and thought-provoking" novel revolving around an academic gathering at a hotel on a Scottish island (Irvine Welsh, The Guardian ). At Willowdale, a Victorian mansion hotel on a Scottish island, a group of English Literature lecturers and students have arrived from Glasgow. They are preparing for a weekend of lectures and intellectual discussions, though some look forward to less studious interactions as well. But as they gather, they don't yet know that this brief weekend will mark a major turning point in the emotional lives of several people, in ways that they never expected, in a novel from a Whitbread Award author that is filled with "deft one-liners [and an] undertow of sadness" ( Times Literary Supplement ). "Wonderfully witty and wistful." — The Daily Mail "The great McIlvanney themes—class, guilt, the power of the book, the difficulty of goodness—are all there, seething under the surface." — The Daily Telegraph )

Two

One of the problems nowadays with Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Andrew Lawson was saying in his not unattractively portentous voice – is that it is familiar to us before we have read it. Mr Hyde has become a cliché of antisocial behaviour. Everybody knows one. Like Don Quixote or Hamlet, he has entered popular culture by a kind of osmosis. We feel we know him before we ever meet him. It is hard to come at him fresh. We may lessen the impact of the book because of the flabby assumptions we bring to it. But try to imagine the shock of his sudden appearance in Victorian society.

Open-mouthed, Marion pushed the pause button on her tape-recorder, as if enacting the shock Andrew Lawson was talking about. Someone was trying the door of her room. She was sure she had seen the handle turn. She thought she might also have heard the infinitesimal, flat click of a lock refusing to yield.

She was sitting cross-legged on the bed in her pyjamas with the lights out. The moonlight that infiltrated the thin curtains made a daguerreotype of the room. The impression had been pleasing to her, as if she were sitting inside a nineteenth-century photograph, had re-entered the time in which this building was conceived. She had been imagining the ghosts of old inhabitants wandering the corridors, while the deep voice on the tape seemed to be talking of an era when they would have done so in the flesh. It had been an eerie feeling.

Suddenly, imagined eeriness had become real, and with it her fear. She had been gazing abstractedly at the door, listening to the hypnotic sound, when the handle had turned. Her finger had pressed automatically on the machine, erasing the voice as if it had been a medium calling up dead spirits.

Holding her breath, she continued to stare at the handle. It turned again. She managed not to call out. She forced herself to go on staring at the door-handle. Very slowly, nothing happened.

She looked at her watch. 2.15. Well into Sunday. She wondered who could be trying her door at this time. If it had been Vikki, she would surely have knocked. There was no one she could think of. There was no reason she could think of. She laid the tape-recorder on the bed and very quietly crossed towards the door, wincing at the creaking moan a floorboard made under the carpet, like the sound of the past buried in modernity but not yet dead. Crouched at the door, she listened. The only thing to disturb her was her breathing.

Very carefully she tried to release the lock, her tongue sticking out as if the elaborate expression of a dread might forestall its consequences. The lock clicked softly, reverberating like a rifle shot in her head. She clenched the handle, leaning instantly against the door to withstand any sudden pressure from the other side. She turned the handle slowly. She pulled the door open. There was nothing in front of her but blank wall.

It was a nondescript off-white, she noticed. The thought was like common sense returning. She put her head out, looked left and right: carpeted corridor and dim, dead light. She was about to shut the door again when she sensed that something wasn’t as it should be. She put her head back out and looked left. Two rooms along, on the opposite wall of the corridor, the door was open – an oblong of darkness where polished wood should be. Beside the open door, sitting on the carpet against the wall, there was what looked like a toilet bag. Was that the room from which she had heard shouting earlier and had been too frightened to come out? The noise had been so violent, she wondered what could have happened.

She stepped out into the corridor and listened. No sound came from the darkened room. She tiptoed towards it on her bare feet. She stopped and craned round the door jamb.

She thought at first she really was seeing a ghost. The motionless figure of a woman sat with its back towards her. She was facing a window with open curtains, against which the moonlight sharpened her outline. Beyond her the sea was turgid.

‘Excuse me,’ Marion said.

The woman remained motionless.

‘Excuse me!’

The woman’s head turned slightly to the left but it was her only movement. She said nothing. Her head turned back towards the sea.

Marion walked into the room, feeling embarrassed to be in her pyjamas but unable simply to walk away. When she stood beside the woman, Marion paused, transfixed by her utter self-absorption.

She sat like a woman in the waiting-room of a railway station where no trains came any more. She seemed dressed to travel but unable to move. Her cashmere coat was buttoned. A small travelling-bag lay on the floor beside her. There were some objects on the table in front of her. The only one Marion identified clearly was a small coolbag. The woman was staring through the windows at the moonlight on the sea. She was as bleak an image as Marion could remember seeing. Marion followed the woman’s eyes out into the darkness. Diseased and deadening pallor on the waters and the land. It was as if, Marion thought, the night was painting her mood. The world had leprosy.

‘Are you all right?’

The woman turned almost towards Marion without confronting her directly. Her face was cadaverous in the moonlight. ‘I’m not sure,’ she said.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I wouldn’t think so.’

‘Can I do something for you?’

The woman shook her head.

‘You see, you left your door open.’

The woman had an expression vague enough to suggest that she didn’t know doors could be closed, and turned again towards the window.

‘Shall I close it for you?’

‘If you like.’

Marion felt reluctant to leave but the woman was watching the sea again.

‘Who are you?’ Marion said. Once she had expressed it, the question seemed slightly impertinent. It had surfaced automatically because she couldn’t identify the woman as a member of the study group. The woman thought about it for a moment.

‘Sandra,’ she said. Something like a smile that died in embryo happened in her face. ‘I think.’

Marion smiled too but the woman didn’t notice.

‘I’ll close the door then, shall I?’

Marion went out and closed the door. Back in her own room, she turned the lock again. If Vikki decided to come back now, that was her problem. She went and sat on the bed among her notes. She wondered what the woman was doing there. She didn’t know whose room it was or if it had been occupied until tonight. She lifted her tape-recorder.

She was glad Andrew Lawson had given her permission to tape all the lectures. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight and the tape gave her something to distract her from herself. She would make notes of the parts that had interested her. It would take her mind off the embarrassment. How could she have done what she did this evening? Perhaps that was why someone had tried her door. Maybe they imagined she was available. The thought would have been laughable last night. No doubt it was still laughable but she didn’t find it as easy to be amused now.

She looked at the tape-recorder. She was almost at the part about the names, the part she had found most interesting. She pressed the button.

Perhaps one of the most striking things about the novel is the scarcity of event. What does Hyde actually do on all those occasions when he escapes from the body of Jekyll? It’s very vague. Of course, Victorian convention would forbid too many details. Perhaps that’s why a Hollywood version of the novel introduced Ingrid Bergman to proceedings. But Stevenson turned this limitation to his advantage. There is a story of Michelangelo confronting the marble from which he would carve the statue of David. Someone had started to work on it before him and had lost his nerve. But not before he had cut a large piece from it. The story is that Michelangelo contrived to conjure the damaged marble into the posture of David’s body. He made a virtue of necessity. Stevenson does something similar. Obliged to work with an enforced reticence, he induces us to inform the silence with our own imagination. We fill the void with ourselves. And isn’t that what we try to do with our own lives?

And Vikki, Marion was thinking. What about Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde? Marion had woken up this morning alone in a room beside a bed that hadn’t been slept in. Vikki hadn’t explained herself when she came to change before breakfast, rather bizarrely dressed. There had only been raised eyebrows and knowing smiles between them. But the knowledge wasn’t Marion’s. What had happened?

Just before midnight on Friday evening Vikki had sat in the room she was sharing with Marion. Marion was already asleep. She hadn’t taken any alcohol tonight, saying she was saving herself for a Saturday night blow-out. That probably translated into gin and tonic twice.

Vikki had opened one of the four bottles of wine she had brought. She filled herself a glass. She sat down on the single bed in the Janet Reger underwear she had put on after Marion fell asleep. She told herself she was toasting the weekend ahead but the toast stuck in her throat. The wine might as well have turned back into grapes. She had already lost faith in her ability to make the weekend more than a passionate encounter with words, an affair with dead men called R.L.S. and J. M. Barrie. No first names here, please.

After arriving at the hotel she hadn’t changed out of the jeans and top she had travelled in. She didn’t have the nerve. Maybe it was just as well. Most of the students had dressed so casually that the clothes she had brought would have made her look like a fading actress who had lost her way to the première. Yet the young women students had still managed to be sexily attractive. Perhaps that was what being young did for you. Nubile bodies could look enticing in baggy combat trousers and a tank top. Youth was the ultimate cosmetic, one you couldn’t buy in any shop she knew of.

She glanced across at Marion, lying demurely immobile in her own single bed. She slept like a dead one and Vikki saw in her the corpse of her own future. Nights of rest untrammelled by the searching hands of men. She remembered the weight of Alan’s arm across her body, heavy in sleep, and suddenly missed it with agonising intensity, as if it were a limb of her own identity she had lost. It wasn’t him she missed, she knew. It was who she had been and could never be again. She was mourning herself.

She saw her clothes hanging in the open wardrobe. Their empty stillness accused her – the disembodied alternative selves she might have been, if she’d had the courage. Maybe she should have had the nun’s dress lengthened and bought the wimple to go with it. A wimple for a wimp. She brought the dress determinedly into focus. It palpitated in her vision like a neon sign in Soho. It mocked her. You don’t dare come in, do you?

Why didn’t she? She remembered a boy in the woods near her home when she was fourteen. She was taking a shortcut through the trees to get to her house when she became aware of him, maybe thirty yards away. She could see him still. He had black hair that hung over his forehead almost to his eyebrows. His head was framed among leaves, turned fixedly towards her, watching. He was unlike any of the boys she saw in the classroom or the playground or on the street, swathed in attitudes that were too big for them, like adult clothes they were dressing up in. He seemed as startled as she was, raw with surprise. He was utterly who he was, an anonymous being caught in a shaft of sunlight, staring at a presence he had never seen before. He stood, as natural as an animal.

She stopped, transfixed by the intensity of his stare. He was transfixed by hers. A bird sang somewhere. Leaves tinkled in the breeze, like muted wind-chimes. She felt as if they couldn’t move. They were trapped in each other. Something had to happen to release them. It did. Suddenly he shouted across the green distance between them. At first, in her state of trance, it was sheer sound, as basic as the bellow of a beast. It troubled her. But as the noise resolved itself into words, she reverted to being a girl who had to get home. And quickly. ‘D’you want a ride?’

She swerved and ran. There was no sound of pursuit, no breaking branches, no battered leaves. Against her own wishes, she stopped and turned. She was gasping but it was not an unpleasant sensation. He stood exactly where he had been, still visible down a tunnel of leaves, still watching her. He looked forlorn, as if he had been trying to pay her a compliment in a language that was foreign to her.

It wasn’t foreign now, she thought. As she raised the glass to her lips, she heard herself laughingly whisper ‘Yes!’ into it. She smiled and reflected ruefully that he was too far away to hear her.

Did such times accumulate till they defined you, trapped you in the refusal of yourself? There had been other times when rules that came from nowhere she could precisely locate (her mother, her father, what teachers said, conclaves of girls comparing notes?) had pre-empted what she felt, so that she prejudged the possibilities before they could happen and sentenced them to death, and thought it good.

The man at the café table in Madrid came back to her. Alan was visiting the stadium of Real Madrid. She couldn’t remember its name. She didn’t want to. They had spent a morning of loneliness in the Prado like vandals, their mutual displeasure spoiling everything they looked at. Their mood had desecrated Velázquez, defaced Goya. Only one painting hung in her memory from that visit. It was very small, easily missed. It showed the frontal image of a man’s face gazing pleadingly upwards, framed in flames. It was called ...