Weekend by William McIlvanney Read Free Book Online Page B

guilt. He hated guilt, how destructively addictive it could become. It paralysed you. There was an ironic thought. Could you develop paralysis by association, by proximity to the paralysed? The self-pity of the idea was enough to make you feel guilty, he thought, smiling bitterly to himself. He noticed the residue of whisky in the glass beside him.
    He knew he was drinking too much. Every glass he took brought questions with it. What if a crisis arose and he was drunk? What if he fell asleep and Catriona needed him? It was as if every impulse had to submit itself to a committee before it could be fulfilled. Even this trip – two nights away with a couple of colleagues and a group of students – spoke quietly to him of selfishness.
    At least he was going. This was the one time away he wassure of every year. Perhaps the number of trips he had already taken made it easier to do it again. Perhaps the repetition of an action numbed the guilt of it.
    Certainly, most times when he had a desire to do something solely for himself, the intention became so enmeshed in complications of doubt that he usually finished up doing nothing. It was easier that way. Perhaps that’s why his work had become, outside Catriona, so all-consuming in his life. There could be no guilt in that. It was something he had to do for both of them. It was how he could provide a carer for her. It was how he had been able to afford the alterations to the house that took her increasingly limited mobility into account as the disease progressed. It was how he had been able to promise her that she would remain in her own place to the very end.
    Beyond Catriona and the university, his life had been, for a long time now, something that took place mainly inside his head. His life, too,
had
been paralysed in a mild way. He lived among endless circular thoughts that seemed incapable of finding their way through into action. What action? Catriona was there and she needed him more than any other demands on him that he could think of, even those that were born inside himself.
    The thought did what such thoughts always did. It overcame his self-pity with the reality of Catriona’s vastly greater suffering. She was the only one of them who had any right to complain about life and she hadn’t done much of that, even when she’d had the means to. Perhaps she couldn’t afford to or she would have gone under more quickly. These days, he was largely guessing about what she felt.
    He was wondering now. He put down his glass and went out into the hall. The railings there and the stair-lift attachedto the wall struck him as poignant. They had been fitted at different stages of her deterioration. Now even they were useless except as milestones along a dark road she had gone alone.
    At the door of the room he paused and listened. There wasn’t even the sound of breathing. He pushed the door open gently. Light filtering through the curtains reached as far as the bed she lay in. He crossed quietly and stood looking down at her.
    For a moment he panicked. Then an expression – indicating what, he didn’t know – brushed her face as gently as a cobweb, stirred her features infinitesimally and left them. She was alive.
    He watched her. In this flattering light and given the position of her head, the weight loss was somehow minimised. He saw her almost as she had been once. He remembered them making love and was glad he hadn’t been with anyone else since her illness had made them celibate. He knew the gladness had a doubtful basis, was another of those expressions in his life whose meaning he wasn’t sure of. Was it the result of noble self-denial or a lack of sexual drive? He felt the gladness anyway. Perhaps even the gift she was unaware of was still a gift, futile yet an expression of love, like flowers laid at the grave of one of the dead.
    Watching her, he felt anew the injustice of what had happened to her. The innocence of her face was no illusion. He had once told her that