When Kevin left, Alison and Kate had arrived in Jacqui’s flat to help her through the trauma – at least that was what Alison had thought they were doing. They had finished up moving in with her. But instead of helping her to get beyond her bad time, they seemed to have allowed her simply to get comfortable in it. Their sympathy had apparently reinforced her bitterness rather than alleviating it.
As if confirming what Alison was thinking, Jacqui looked round the bar critically, like a judge at an amateur-dramatics competition who wasn’t impressed. Kate observed her anxiously.
‘I still fancy going,’ Kate said.
‘For what?’ Jacqui said. ‘What can you get there you can’t get here?’ She indicated the busy bar. ‘If you want it, that is.’
Alison resented Jacqui’s enjoyment of the influence she had over Kate. It was obvious that Kate was keen to go on the study weekend Professor Lawson had organised. It was also obvious that she didn’t feel confident enough to go without Jacqui’s company. Alison smiled. It was so like Kate to get excited about something as banal as a trip to Cannamore. Peter Pan with tits – to go on a study weekend will be a great adventure. Still, such naïve enthusiasm was refreshing. In deciding to try to help Kate manoeuvre Jacqui into going on the trip, Alison admitted to herself that she had her own reasons for wanting to be in the flat without them this weekend. But maybe altruism was always leavened with self-interest.
‘What can you get there that you can’t get here?’ Alison said. ‘Maybe the chance to explore more than somebody else’s crotch.’
‘You mean there is more?’ Jacqui said.
‘Oh, enough with the Cynic-of-the-Year stuff,’ Alison said. ‘For a start, you’ll have a chance to talk to men without any assumptions being made. In places like this, you smile and some of them think you’ve thrown your knickers at them.’
‘Men? You mean like Andrew Lawson?’
‘He’s nice,’ Kate said. ‘He’s very nice.’
‘I didn’t say he wasn’t.’
‘At least he says some interesting things,’ Alison said.
‘He said I was to phone him tonight if we decided to go,’ Kate said. ‘He’s got two cancellations. He’ll be waiting to hear.’
Jacqui turned her mouth down.
‘Come on,’ Kate said. ‘What about it?’
‘I went last year,’ Alison said. ‘It was really good.’
Jacqui took a delaying sip of her Bacardi and Coke.
‘Where is it anyway?’
‘Willowvale,’ Kate said.
‘I’ve never heard of it,’ Jacqui said.
‘You missed the lecture when Andrew Lawson told us about it. He told us a lot about the place. It sounds really interesting.’
‘Willowvale?’
Its foundations had been laid in the imagination of a Victorian mill-owner, Andrew Lawson had told his students. He knew that because the present owner, Gordon Mitchell, had given him a copy of a monograph called Edward Muldoon: The Other Carnegie, by P. Vincent J. Witherspoon. Gordon had offered him the pamphlet not just because he was a frequent visitor but because he was obviously as fascinated by the place as its owner was. From the first time he went there with his students, he had sensed the building not just as a place but as a brooding presence. Like a stranger looming large but saying nothing, it challenged him to understand it.
The monograph, Andrew quickly decided, wasn’t about to tell the true story of Willowvale. As he read, turning back from time to time to look at the black-and-white cover, it occurred to him that the way the author presented his own name was a clue. P. Vincent J. Witherspoon was as stiff as a starched collar. The date of the printing was 1926 but P. Vincent J., to give him his informal name, would already be old by that time and must have remained a discreet Victorian while the twenties roared around him.
Also, he had been a personal friend of Edward Muldoon, a slightly more youthful, admiring one, and was writing after Muldoon’s death. It was an act of homage, a Victorian statue in words, offering a life as a frozen stance rather than a fluid reality. Witherspoon was anxious not only to choose the most flattering posture he could find for his friend but for himself as well. There would be no treacherous deviation into harsh truth from this staunch supporter. That the monograph appeared to have been printed privately with Witherspoon’s own money must have allowed his work to avoid any interference from others.
Witherspoon wasn’t actively dishonest. Hints of an interpretation of Muldoon’s life bleaker than the one on offer here were scattered through his writing like polite coughing, which you were left to interpret as you would. Andrew learned to appreciate trying to work out what the tangential remarks and discreet silences might mean.
‘It might be said that his beloved spouse found their splendid new dwelling less congenial than might have been anticipated.’ She was probably miserable, Andrew thought. ‘Yet even Croesus must have deemed it necessary to curtail the grandiosity of his ambitions.’ Muldoon ran out of money?
Andrew even began to enjoy Witherspoon’s evasive prose. It somehow suited Willowvale, the monument the monograph had been written essentially to celebrate. Like the building, the words were ornate beyond necessity. They baffled instant understanding of their purpose, as Willowvale did. Through careful rereadings, Andrew found himself engaged in an imaginative inhabiting of a darker life than the one being presented to him.
Witherspoon had a long and florid section near the beginning of his account where he suggested what had been the origins of Muldoon’s compulsion to build Willowvale. Many of his expressions reverberated in Andrew’s mind: ‘He was a visionary among the dark satanic mills’, ‘a place where truth might disport itself among congenial company’, ‘wealth metamorphosed into wisdom’, ‘a sea-girt Eden’, ‘a dwelling for his dreams’. Bringing the punctiliousness of an academic to such language, trying to sift fact from linguistic fabrication, Andrew worked out his own sense of the life of Edward Muldoon and what Willowvale was supposed to mean. Muldoon had been the son of a Scottish mill-owner whose crass love of money had offended his youthful sensitivities. After a failed attempt to be a painter, he had grudgingly accepted his destiny as a capitalist. Like many converts to a faith, he had become assiduous in the practice of it. Perhaps out of revenge, some thought, he made his father’s success look like the work of a dilettante. One mill became many.
But Andrew was convinced that those who thought he was merely extending his father’s achievement were mistaken. The intensity of his new religion had an almost mystical dimension to it. Witherspoon had some basis for seeing him as a visionary. The more money he made, the more likely he was to be able to transubstantiate it into his vision, which was Willowvale.
‘So where is Willowvale?’ Jacqui said.
She saw Kate’s face become more animated, presumably because the question suggested serious interest and therefore the prospect of going.
‘On Cannamore,’ Kate said.
‘But that’s an island.’
‘They have things called ferries,’ Alison said.
‘I don’t like the sea. I get seasick easily.’
‘Maybe you should wait till they build an airport,’ Alison said.
Alison’s superciliousness was beginning to annoy Jacqui again. Because she had worked as personal assistant to a lawyer for a few years before coming to university, she had these moods when she seemed to treat younger people as if they were still in kindergarten. She was like someone who visits London for a weekend and decides she’s cosmopolitan and very, very grown-up. She even dressed for