Weekend by William McIlvanney Page A

way.
    A woman he had never seen before was walking into the bar, as if it were open and full of people. He thought perhaps he was hallucinating. She was certainly dressed for an occasion which wasn’t now. Was she the ghost of the hotel? If she was, he was pleased to meet her. But surely no ghost ever had flesh that was so sweetly solid against the light. In the completely unimagined suddenness of the moment, he felt something he had trained himself for years not to feel. He felt desire for a woman. It happened in him before he had time to reason with it. By the time the woman went to the end of the bar and turned, and he realised that he had seen her before, it was too late. It was no longer his sense of himself that was meeting her. It was a part of him that sense had for so long denied. Something in him, so patiently domesticated, had snapped its chain. When he spoke, his words sounded, even to himself, more growl than speech.
    ‘Vikki,’ he said. ‘You look amazing.’
    It wasn’t the kind of thing he said. The strangeness of the words was like an alternative self speaking. But that self was out now and in control.
    ‘Dr Lawson,’ she said.
    ‘Andrew,’ he said, as if naming himself for the first time.
    There was a pause.
    ‘Andrew,’ she said, almost submissively.
    ‘I was looking for a drink,’ he said, and was pleased to hear he had made no attempt to conceal what he was doing. ‘Whisky.’
    ‘I don’t have that,’ she said. ‘Wine, though. I have some wine.’
    ‘You do? Where?’
    ‘In the room.’
    ‘I can adapt,’ he said.
    She hesitated.
    ‘Lead on, Vikki.’
    She turned and began to walk out of the bar. He followed her. As they came out and turned towards the foyer and the staircase, he noticed that the light in the lounge was out. Mickey Deans and Kate Foster must have gone to bed. Together or separately? he wondered. But he felt no envy at the moment.
    As they went up the staircase, he put his hand on her arm. He hoped it looked as if he was helping her in a gentlemanly way but he knew it was an act of possession and he enjoyed that it was. She didn’t object. Outside her room she stopped. She seemed to be having doubts.
    ‘Marion’s asleep,’ she said. ‘Marion Gibson. I’m sharing with her.’
    ‘You want
me
to get the wine?’
    He hoped she wouldn’t say yes.
    ‘No, no. You don’t even know where it is.’
    But she seemed uncertain. She looked at him. He made a drinking gesture with his cupped hand.
    ‘I’ll try to pass it out to you quietly,’ she whispered, as if her voice was practising the stealth her body would need.
    ‘Pass it out? Vikki. The idea’s to have a dorm feast. I’ve got some biscuits. You wouldn’t ask a man to drink a bottle of wine alone? You’ll be back before she wakes up, all right.’
    Vikki giggled and tentatively opened the door, grimacing. As he waited for her, he relished how a dead night had turned into a small adventure. She passed a bottle of wine out to him and disappeared. He was dismayed until he noted that the door was still open. Presumably she was coming back. He glanced at the label. It was an anonymous Chardonnay but the company might improve the vintage. She emerged with two more bottles of wine and her handbag. He took another bottle from her to prevent the clinking of glass. She closed the door.
    ‘I don’t have a corkscrew,’ he said conspiratorially.
    She held up her handbag and widened her eyes.
    It had been as simple as that. Watching her lying asleep in his bed, he couldn’t believe how easily it had happened. They had slept together two nights now. But who had been sleeping with her? It wasn’t anybody he recognised. Was he the same man who had sat in his house yesterday, thinking of his wife?
     
     
     
     
    The name Jekyll itself further disperses the reader’s ability to locate any fixed moral centre in the text. If these narrow, cackling syllables connote anything, it must be jackal. And the jackal is not only