A GIFT FROM NESSUS
William
McIlvanney
Copyright © William McIlvanney, 1968
This digital edition first published in 2014 by Canongate Books, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
All rights reserved
First published in Great Britain in 1968 by
Eyre & Spottiswoode (Publishers) Ltd
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 9781782111931
for Moira
Deianeira, wife of Hercules, believing that her husband was in love with someone else, gave him a tunic which was said to have the power of restoring the wearer’s love to the giver. When Hercules put it on it adhered to his body, so that when he tried to pull it off, skin came too.
This tunic was a gift from Nessus.
Contents
1
Three things happened more or less at once. Cameron felt the pain in his stomach again, the car developed a strange, unidentified sound, and a passing billboard threw a jigsaw of words at him: nigh, end, is, –. The billboards sprouted along this stretch of moor road like poplars. Man-made, wisdom-bearing trees. ‘The End is Nigh.’ That was it. For him, for the car, for both?
The pain was beginning to enjoy itself, working out minor variations in his stomach. It seemed to start on a single pulse that multiplied itself to several, the small twinges keeping subtle time with the larger. Somehow the quiet agony that was going on inside him attached itself to the day outside so that the very sky was like an expression of pain with the last of the sunlight making the ribbed undersides of the clouds look like raw abrasions. He had the weird experience of feeling as if he was in the middle of his own pain, driving through it like a local shower, and wishing he would come to the end of it. He wondered if it was serious.
What if he was dying? He played academically with the thought, trying to outwit the pain. It was some place to die. The moor lay humped on either side of the road, stretching to miles of desolation. Towards the horizon where the air was already luminous with dusk, a row of pylons was charcoaled against the sky. Nearer the road, the heath undulated in a frozen Sargasso of grass, gorse and bracken. Winter hadn’t helped. It had expurgated summer’s few qualifications of flower and colour, until the moor had been restored to its fundamental statement of barren earth and bleak sky. No irrelevance was allowed to intrude for long here where growth and desolation were locked in a private Armageddon.
It was a depressing place, Cameron thought. Its vastness seemed to erase you. You felt like apologising to it for being so trivial. A pain in the guts seemed pretty insignificant here. Stop the car, walk a hundred yards off the road, and you might as well be on Mars. You could die without being noticed. Come to think of it, he could probably do that anywhere.
It had been a bad day, one of the kind he generally euphemised as a ‘day for keeping in touch with my contacts’. All right, he thought. Imagine it. The perfect end to a perfect day. Car found on the moors. Up to its windscreen in a telegraph pole. Driver’s body cut from the wreckage with acetylene torches. Remains later identified as those of Edward Cameron, thirty-five, salesman for Rocklight, Ltd., manufacturers of electrical equipment. So much for the formalities. Now to apportion the grief. Let’s number the broken hearts. Allison? She would miss him, certainly. You didn’t live with someone for eleven years and not miss him. After all, who would dig the garden for her? His mind registered that he was being unfair, but he let it pass. His children. Yes, Alice and Helen would both miss him. And that was about it. Except for Margaret. She would miss him most of all. There was a funny thing.
And here endeth the mourners’ roll. Not that he blamed the absentees. He wasn’t so sure he would have mourned himself. How could you live for thirty-five years and mean so little? There was something almost impressive about it. What had he achieved? Fourteen years service with Rocklight. Rising to the giddy heights of Area Salesman. A car that wasn’t fully paid up but had gone beyond the guarantee, and now sounded as if it had the combustion engine’s equivalent of asthma. A bungalow, in a modem development area, with modern design, modem fittings, modem mortgage. That’s who would really miss him, his creditors.
He was trying to pretend that the situation was funny to him. But mediocrity weighed dully on his mind like a migraine. He felt seedy with mundanities. In irritation, his right hand came off the steering-wheel and struck at the rib of cushioned leather below the windscreen, as if the car was to blame. In a way, it was a reasonable substitute for censure. It was one of the many financial pressures that surrounded him like