Free Weekend by William McIlvanney Page B

generator. She walked towards the large residents’ lounge which adjoined the small bar. As she came nearer, she noticed that the lounge wasn’t completely dark. A dim light seeped out to stain the carpet for a short distance in front of the door. She stopped beyond the reach of the light. Listening, she heard an intimacy of murmured voices. She thought she should turn away but she couldn’t resist approaching. She peered carefully through the doorway.
    A lamp in the far corner made a small bell of light within which two people sat. Their faces were leaning towards each other. He was dark and she was fair. They had the attractiveness of the utterly preoccupied, the innocence of those completely absorbed in being with one another. Their postures were not passionate but totally intense.
    From this angle she couldn’t make out who the girl was. The boy was Mickey Deans. He had a reputation for aggression but she had always thought he had the kind of dangerous good looks that could make a woman wish she were young again. She was glad she couldn’t hear what they were saying. It would have felt like a profanation of their closeness.
    She turned quietly away and walked towards the door ofthe bar. The place was shadowed, only a little light from the corridor mitigating its gloom. She went and walked among the tables, imagining herself unfazed by many people sitting there.
    She stood at the end of the bar, ignoring the metal shutter. She turned towards the door and said, ‘Oh!’ before she could stop the sound.
    A dark shape, not unlike a bear, stood just inside the doorway. She wasn’t sure what it was, let alone who it was.
    ‘Vikki,’ a dark voice said. There was a pause. ‘You look amazing.’
    She was startled first that the shadow knew her name and, second, that she knew the name of the shadow.
     
     
     
     
    Names are interesting. Jekyll. Hyde. Utterson. We should, of course, be careful of deducing galaxies of significance from atoms of meaning. But the primitive belief in the sympathetic magic of names has maybe a particular resonance in this story of a man who renamed himself. Naming as incantation. A summoning forth. As you call it, so it will be.
     
     
     
     
    Sandra, Marion was thinking, as she looked round the room, wondering about Vikki’s absence for the second successive night. It was such a pleasantly ordinary name for such a bleak, dark woman. Presumably the incantation her parents had been performing in naming her hadn’t worked too well.Maybe they should have called her Deirdre. Sorrow seemed to suit her. But perhaps all christenings are unintentionally ironic, adult wish-fulfilment imposed on a contradictory reality.
    Marion imagined her still sitting there, merging with the emptiness outside her windows. She seemed to Marion at the moment the core of Willowvale, as definitive of the place as the female gargoyle she had noticed on one of the outer walls had become for her. It was as if, in Marion’s mind, the labyrinth of corridors and rooms could lead only to the woman.
     
     
     
     
    The Dr Jekyll who becomes Mr Hyde seems almost to illustrate Christopher Fry’s observation on the nature of names:
    Our names. They make us broody; we sit and sit
To hatch them into reputation and dignity.
And then they set upon us and become despair,
Guilt and remorse.
    We can begin to wonder what our names represent.
     
     
     
     
    ‘David?’ she said.
    She was on the only chair, reapplying her makeup. He found her concentration impressive. It was as if this was all there was, as if the small circular mirror in her hand showedher the whole world. Presumably he had fallen off the edge of it for the moment. Maybe that was one way to handle the situation. For what the hell was there to talk about? He hoped she would go on making love to her face for the next few hours. Then they could both escape. But that seemed unlikely, even for her. He could always pretend to be asleep, except that his head was going