Joining him at the table, she made a determined effort to ignore the fact that his feet were on the surface from which they ate. Men were like that, she reminded herself; they were really quite unsanitary in their habits.
“I bumped into an old friend this morning,” she said casually.
Bruce did not take his eyes off the television set. “Oh yes,”
he said.
“Yes,” said Julia. “I was at school with her. A girl called Catherine. We were actually very close friends at school.”
“The best sort of friend,” said Bruce. “As long as they don’t change. Sometimes you find these people you knew a while ago have become all gross and domestic.”
Julia caught her breath. Did he think that grossness and domesticity went together? “Well, she is married,” she ventured.
“But it hasn’t really changed her. She’s even happier than she used to be, in fact.”
“Chacun à son goût,” remarked Bruce. Then he added: “Glad to hear it.”
Julia looked at her fingernails. “She told me she’s pregnant.”
“That happens,” said Bruce. He was not interested in this sort of thing, women’s gossip, he thought.
Julia persevered. “You couldn’t tell yet, of course. But, anyway, she’s really pleased about that. She and her husband have been hoping for this to happen.”
“They may as well get some sleep now – while they can,”
said Bruce, reaching for his glass of sparkling water. “They won’t get any for the next ten years.”
“But sleep isn’t everything, Brucie!” Julia teased. “And lots of babies sleep quite well, you know. They can be fun.”
There was a silence. On the television set, in some unspecified distant place, a man kicked a ball into a goal. There was cheering and despair. Bruce raised a finger and shook it at the 250 Julia Decides to Test the Temperature set. “There you are,” he said. “That’s what comes from having a cripple for a goalkeeper.”
“Some babies you hardly even notice,” Julia went on.
“These people are seriously useless,” said Bruce. “Did you see that? They’ve just let the other side score a goal and now they’re risking having somebody sent off. Incredible. Just incredible.”
He rose to his feet and walked across to switch off the television set. “I can’t bear anymore,” he said. “I’m going to go and have a bath. Should we go out for dinner tonight? You choose.”
Julia nodded vaguely, but her mind was elsewhere. This was not going to be easy, she thought. She watched Bruce as he left the kitchen, and she realised that, quite apart from anything else, quite apart from the baby – their baby! – she had to secure this man, this gorgeous, gorgeous man, as she thought of him.
This Adonis – what exactly did that word mean? – this rock star – this husband!
Bruce went into the bathroom and slipped out of the moccasins he was wearing. He loved the bathroom floor, which was made of limestone, and had a cool, rough feel on the soles of the feet.
And he liked the decor too, the stone-lined shower cubicle – even if the shower itself required special handling – the double basins with their designer bases, the entire glass shelf which Julia had cleared for the hair gels and shampoo she had seen him unpacking in his room. It was a bathroom for living in, Bruce had decided.
One could move one’s stuff in here and just live in it.
He bent over and started the bath running. There was a cube of bath salts on the edge of the bath, left there by Julia, and he picked this up and smelled it. Lily of the Valley. Well, not what he would exactly have chosen – he preferred sandalwood – but he liked the feel of these things and the way they made the water milky white. So he unwrapped it and broke it into the rapidly filling bath. Then he turned round and his eye caught the small leaflet which was lying on the floor at the end of the bath. He reached forward and picked it up. He became quite still.
A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair 251
For a few moments after he had finished reading the leaflet that came with Julia’s pregnancy testing kit, Bruce did nothing.
Then, quite slowly, he pivoted round and turned off the running water. Now there was silence in the bathroom.
Bruce looked at the leaflet again. She told me, he thought.
I asked her and she told me. I very specifically, very considerately, asked her, and she reassured me. And now . . . What if the result had been positive? What if he was already responsible for
. . . He suddenly remembered the conversation they had had in the kitchen. He had dismissed it, thought nothing of it. Women always talked about babies, but now he realised that there was a very good reason for Julia having raised the subject.
He looked at the bathwater. He would get in and do some serious thinking in the bath, thinking about his future, thinking about escape routes.
75. A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair Angus Lordie had painted very little since the fateful day of Cyril’s arrest. He had been finishing a portrait which had been commissioned by the board of a whisky company; the sittings were done, and he was now working from photographs, but his heart was not in it. It seemed to him that although Cyril was no longer lying at his feet, as he normally did, he was somehow insinuating himself into the very painting, somewhere in the background, a canine presence, a shadow. No, it was hopeless: a painter could not work when his muse lay somewhere in a cold pound, awaiting trial for something that he did not do.
On that morning, although Angus knew that he would have to force himself into his studio, he sat unhappily at his breakfast table, toying with his food; even a Pittenweem kipper seemed unap-petising while he was in this frame of mind. Food was a problem.
The previous evening, to tempt himself to eat, he had treated himself to several thick slices of the smoked salmon sent down to 252 A Prayer from a Painter in Utter Despair him from Argyll by his friend Archie Graham. Archie’s salmon, which he steeped in rum and then smoked himself, was, in Angus Lordie’s opinion, the finest smoked salmon in Scotland, but he had found that in his current mood he had little appetite even for that. Indeed, since Cyril’s arrest, Angus had lost a considerable amount of weight. He now had to wear a belt with the trousers that had previously fitted him perfectly ungebelt, and his collars, normally slightly tight because of the age of his shirts, could now have two fingers inserted between them and his neck and waggled about without discomfort. If a dog could pine for a man, thought Angus, then a man could just as readily pine for a dog.
He lingered over his coffee, watching a shaft of sunlight creep slowly across the table to illuminate the cracks in the wooden surface, the ancient crumbs these contained. We are not worthy, he thought, so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table . . . The familiar words of the Book of Common Prayer came back to him unbidden, from the liturgy of the Scottish Episcopal Church, in which he had been raised and to which, when he felt the need, he always went home; these phrases lodged in the mind, to surface at unexpected moments, such as this, and brought with them their particular form of consola-tion. Such language, such resonant, echoing phrases – man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live . . . Dearly Beloved we are gathered together here in the sight of God –
this was the linguistic heritage bequeathed to the English-speaking peoples in the liturgy and in the Authorised Version by Cranmer and by Jamie Sext, James VI, a monarch with whom Angus had always felt a great affinity. And what had we done with it, with this language and all its dignity? Exchanged it for the banalities of the disc jockey, for the cheap coin of a debased English, for all the vulgarities and obscenities that had polluted broadcasting. And nobody taught children how to speak clearly anymore; nobody taught them to articulate, with the result that there were so many now who spoke from unopened mouths, their words all joined together in some indecipherable slur. You have taken away our language; you have betrayed us. Yes. Yes.