‘You’re right. It was fun while it lasted.’
Rachel touched his arm.
Don’t flinch, don’t argue, don’t push her away.
‘It’ll be a great book. You’re always saying how underrated Lunan is. This is your big chance to put him on the map.’
‘I hope so.’
‘I know so. Fergus does too.’
The pair of them discussing him. Where? Over dinner? In bed? Did he ever feature in the little bit of ciné film she ran behind her eyes while Fergus fucked her?
He said, ‘Rachel, Fergus can’t stand me.’
She took her coat from the hook on the back of his office door.
‘Don’t be so paranoid, Murray. You know Fergus. If he didn’t think you were a valuable member of the department, you wouldn’t be enjoying a year’s sabbatical, you’d be looking for a new post.’
Murray stood at his office window. It was still wild outside. The wind caught at Rachel’s hair, blowing it across her face. She struggled for a moment with the car door, then she was in, headlamps on, reversed out and away, her only backward glance at the road behind though the rear-view mirror. It was the last time. He wondered if it was the peeping Tom or his own invitation to go for a drink that had pushed Rachel away. Maybe she had always intended to it end like this. Murray stood at the window, watching the trees fingering the sky the same way they would if he weren’t there. On his way out he stopped by the gatehouse and handed the almost-full bottle of malt to the porter, who received it with grateful, bland surprise.
Chapter Six
THE REASONS MURRAY WATSON usually avoided Fowlers were clustered around their customary corner table, looking like a eugenicist’s nightmare. The pub wasn’t busy, but it was warming up with the overspill of office workers and students from more popular establishments so he was halfway to the bar before he spotted Vic Costello, Lyle Joff and Phyllida McWilliams and remembered that this was where they congregated late on Friday afternoons, playing at being the Algonquin club and staving off the wretchedness of the weekend.
Maybe the need to suffer that misery so often brings in its wake would have led him into their company anyway, or maybe he would have settled for a lone pint and a nod in their direction, but then he felt a hand on his elbow and turned to see Rab Purvis’s face, shiny with sweat and bonhomie.
‘I’ll get this, Moira.’ It was typical of Rab to be on first-name terms with the manageress; typical too of him to add Murray’s drink to the round and a tip on top of the price. Mrs Noon nodded her thanks and Rab gave Murray’s elbow a squeeze that told him his friend was at least three pints to the good. ‘Come away into the body of the kirk.’
It had drifted beyond the time where even late diners could pretend to be having a pre-prandial and the department’s dwindling stock of alcoholics welcomed Murray with hearty relief. He was the fresh blood, the bringer of new topics, the excuse to get another round in and postpone the moment when the pub door swung home and they each stepped out alone.
‘Hello, stranger.’ Phyllida McWilliams’s voice had lost its usual edge and now held the full throaty promise of a pack of unfiltered Camels. She leaned over and gave Murray a kiss. ‘Why do we never see you?’
Murray didn’t bother to mention that she’d passed him in the corridor three days ago, her head bowed, looking like Miss Marple’s hungover younger sister.
‘You know how it is, Phyllida. I’m a busy little bee.’
Phyllida picked a blonde hair from Murray’s lapel and raised her eyebrows.
‘He’s a B, all right,’ said Vic Costello. ‘Leave him alone, Phyl, you don’t know where he’s been.’
The woman let the hair fall from her fingers onto the barroom floor. She nodded. ‘Many a true word.’
‘He flits from flower to flower.’
Rab conducted a little minuet in the air with his hand.
Phyllida laughed her barmaid’s laugh and started to recite,
‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I:
In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat’s back I do fly . . .’
It was worse than he’d thought. They must have been there for hours. Murray wondered if they suspected about Rachel. He should go home, make himself something to eat, think things through.
Lyle Joff began an anecdote about a conference he’d attended in Toronto. Phyllida clamped an interested expression onto her face and Vic Costello rolled the beer around in his glass, staring sadly into space. Over by the bar Mrs Noon turned up the music and Willie Nelson cranked into ‘Whisky River’. Vic Costello placed his hand on top of Phyllida McWilliams’s and she let him keep it there for a moment before drawing hers away. Murray wondered if Vic’s divorce was finalised and if he had moved out of the family home yet, or if he was still camping in the space that had once been his study.
Phyllida leaned against Murray and asked, ‘Seriously, where have you been?’
She took his hand in hers and started to stroke his fingers.
‘Around.’ Murray tried to return her flirt, but he could see Vic Costello’s slumped features on Phyllida’s other side and, despite the rips in its fabric, the banquette they were sharing was reminiscent enough of a bed to invite unwelcome thoughts of ménage à trois. ‘I was at the National Library today, working though what’s left of Archie’s papers.’
‘Oh.’ Phyllida’s fascination was a thin veneer over boredom. ‘Find any fabulous new poems?’
‘No, but I did find notes for a sci-fi novel.’
‘Poor Murray, out to restore and revive, and all you get is half-boiled genre fiction.’
Murray laughed with her, though the barb hurt. He took out his notebook and flipped it open at the pages where he’d copied down the contents of Archie’s jotter.
‘I found this, a catalogue of names.’
Phyllida glanced at the scribbled page.
‘Obviously trying to work out what to call his characters, and doing rather badly, poor sod.’
Murray wondered why he hadn’t realised it earlier. The disappointment sounded in his voice.
‘You think so?’
She gave his hand a sympathetic squeeze.
‘Undoubtedly.’
‘Shit, I thought it might have been something.’
He snapped his notebook shut.
Murray’s curse seemed to wake Vic Costello from his trance. He necked the last three inches of his beer.
‘It’s my shout.’
‘Not for me, thanks.’ Lyle Joff raised his glass to his lips and the last of his heavy slid smoothly down. ‘It’s past my curfew.’ He gave Murray a complicit look. ‘Bedtime-story duty. Winnie the Pooh – a marvellous antidote to a hard day at the coalface.’
As preposterous as the image of chubby Joff at a coalface was, it seemed more feasible than the picture of him sitting at the bedside of freshly washed, pyjama-clad toddlers reading about a bear of little brain. Murray had been introduced to Joff’s wife at a faculty party once; she was prettier than he’d expected. He wondered how they’d met and why Joff was so often in the early-evening company of people for whom the only alternative to the pub was the empty flat, the armchair tortured with cigarette burns and the book collection that was only so much comfort.
Vic Costello looked at his watch.