Weekend. William McIlvanney

the window.

      ‘Shall I close it for you?’

      ‘If you like.’

      Marion felt reluctant to leave but the woman was watching the sea again.

      ‘Who are you?’ Marion said. Once she had expressed it, the question seemed slightly impertinent. It had surfaced automatically because she couldn’t identify the woman as a member of the study group. The woman thought about it for a moment.

      ‘Sandra,’ she said. Something like a smile that died in embryo happened in her face. ‘I think.’

      Marion smiled too but the woman didn’t notice.

      ‘I’ll close the door then, shall I?’

      Marion went out and closed the door. Back in her own room, she turned the lock again. If Vikki decided to come back now, that was her problem. She went and sat on the bed among her notes. She wondered what the woman was doing there. She didn’t know whose room it was or if it had been occupied until tonight. She lifted her tape-recorder.

      She was glad Andrew Lawson had given her permission to tape all the lectures. She wasn’t going to be able to sleep tonight and the tape gave her something to distract her from herself. She would make notes of the parts that had interested her. It would take her mind off the embarrassment. How could she have done what she did this evening? Perhaps that was why someone had tried her door. Maybe they imagined she was available. The thought would have been laughable last night. No doubt it was still laughable but she didn’t find it as easy to be amused now.

      She looked at the tape-recorder. She was almost at the part about the names, the part she had found most interesting. She pressed the button.

      Perhaps one of the most striking things about the novel is the scarcity of event. What does Hyde actually do on all those occasions when he escapes from the body of Jekyll? It’s very vague. Of course, Victorian convention would forbid too many details. Perhaps that’s why a Hollywood version of the novel introduced Ingrid Bergman to proceedings. But Stevenson turned this limitation to his advantage. There is a story of Michelangelo confronting the marble from which he would carve the statue of David. Someone had started to work on it before him and had lost his nerve. But not before he had cut a large piece from it. The story is that Michelangelo contrived to conjure the damaged marble into the posture of David’s body. He made a virtue of necessity. Stevenson does something similar. Obliged to work with an enforced reticence, he induces us to inform the silence with our own imagination. We fill the void with ourselves. And isn’t that what we try to do with our own lives?

      And Vikki, Marion was thinking. What about Dr Jekyll and Mrs Hyde? Marion had woken up this morning alone in a room beside a bed that hadn’t been slept in. Vikki hadn’t explained herself when she came to change before breakfast, rather bizarrely dressed. There had only been raised eyebrows and knowing smiles between them. But the knowledge wasn’t Marion’s. What had happened?

      Just before midnight on Friday evening Vikki had sat in the room she was sharing with Marion. Marion was already asleep. She hadn’t taken any alcohol tonight, saying she was saving herself for a Saturday night blow-out. That probably translated into gin and tonic twice.

      Vikki had opened one of the four bottles of wine she had brought. She filled herself a glass. She sat down on the single bed in the Janet Reger underwear she had put on after Marion fell asleep. She told herself she was toasting the weekend ahead but the toast stuck in her throat. The wine might as well have turned back into grapes. She had already lost faith in her ability to make the weekend more than a passionate encounter with words, an affair with dead men called R.L.S. and J. M. Barrie. No first names here, please.