"Fiona, I'm getting rather tired of this," Fergus said through his teeth, his fingers gripping the wheel harder, rubbing round it. "I'm sorry you think what you do about Julie. As I have tried to tell you, she was the wife of an old friend and I've kept in touch since she got divorced —»
"Still stuck on that, Fergus?" Fiona said, impersonating concern. "Oh dear; we had that line back at Arrochar, I seem to recall. And what was the rest of it? Oh yes, one of her sons has leukaemia, poor little kid, hasn't he? And you've helped her and the little darling with BUPA out of the goodness of your heart —»
"Yes I have, and I'm sorry you choose to sneer about it, Fiona."
"Sneer!" laughed Fiona. "It's a joke, Fergus. Jesus, she was practically taking your zip down."
"Oh, don't be ridiculous. It's not my fault Julie got a bit tipsy."
"She was smashed out of her brains, Fergus, and about the only thing she remembered was that she wanted to get your trousers off. God knows why, but she seemed to associate that with pleasure." Fiona gave a sort of strangled laugh, then put one hand up suddenly to her nose, and looked away, and sobbed once.
Fergus drove quickly on, trees flicking past like green ghosts to the right, the waters of the loch just a dark absence on the left.
Fiona sniffed. "Trying the great silence again, eh, Ferg?" She pulled a handkerchief from her handbag on her lap, dabbed at her hose — "Still pretending it'll all go away. Still sticking your head in your precious fucking optical-quality sand."
"Look, can't we talk about this in the morning? I mean, when you're…»
"Sober, Fergus?" she said, looking over at him. "That what you were going to say? Blaming it on drink again? Is that all it was? Of course, silly me. I should have realised. Dear Julie gets drunk and for bizarre reason suddenly starts feeling you up under the table while we're nibbling our cheese and biscuits, and making pathetic double-entendres, and attacks you outside the bathroom; totally unprovoked, of course, and it's all just the drink talking. And I'm just being hysterical, I suppose, because I've had too many of John's terribly strong G and Ts and it'll all look different in the morning and I'll come to you and say sorry and wasn't I being a silly girl last night, and you can pat me on the head and say yes, wasn't I? And you can still go for cocktails at the Frasers" and bridge at the McAlpines and tee off with the Gordons and cruise with the Hamiltons with a united front, a respectable face, can't we, Fergus?"
"Fiona," Fergus said, face set and teeth clenched. "I don't know," breathed, "why you're making such a big thing of this. It's just one of those things that happens at parties; people do get drunk and they do do things they wouldn't normally think of. Maybe Julie has… or has had, in the past, a crush on me or something. I don't know. Maybe —»
"A crush on you, said Fiona. "Jesus. Well, that's a better try, Ferg. But I don't think you're quite as good a liar as you think you are. And she's not that good an actress." Fiona looked down, twisting the handkerchief in her fingers. "Oh God, Ferg, it was so fucking obvious. I mean. I knew there was something going on; all those trips away, and getting drunk and not being able to come home, staying at one of your chums" delightful little pied-a-terres. Oh, sorry, no, you can't phone back, he's only just got it and it hasn't had a phone put in yet. Or coming back with bruises; how you suddenly became so very clumsy or so easily marked. But at least I could still kid myself, at least I didn't have my nose rubbed in it."
"Fiona!" Fergus shouted, knuckles white on the steering wheel. "For God's sake, there's nothing to have your nose rubbed in! Julie's just a friend. I haven't touched her!"
"You didn't have to, she was touching you," Fiona said, voice quiet, looking away from Fergus, out to the darkness of the loch. A few weak lights shone on the far side, and headlights on the Otter Ferry road, two miles away across the black expanse of waves, swung out briefly, like a lighthouse beam… and then dimmed and disappeared. The car roared through another small village before the trees hid the view again.
Fiona kept her face away from him, looking out into the night, watching the vertical bright line of light the car threw onto the serried mass of dark conifers. Even there she could not escape him; she could see his distorted image in the slanted glass of the car's windows, dim in the background, still lit by his instruments.
She wondered how she could ever have thought that she loved him, and why she had stayed with him for so long after she'd realised that if she ever had, she did not love him now.
Of course she could say it was for the children, as people always did… It was true, up to a point. How terrible it was to have those easy phrases, trotted out so often in the course of gossip, or heart-to-hearts, or in magazine articles, or even court cases, become so real.
It was never the sort of thing you thought about when you were young, when you were — or thought you were — in love, and all the future shone with promise.
Problems belonged to other people. You might imagine supporting them, talking with them when they needed to talk, trying to help, but you didn't imagine that you would be the one desperate to talk (or the one too embarrassed to talk, too ashamed or too proud to talk); you didn't imagine you would be the one who needed help, not even when you told friends that of course there might be problems, or agreed with your beloved that you would always talk about things…
Staying together for the children.
And for the adults, she thought. For the sake of appearances. God, she had thought she was above that sort of thing, once. She had been bright and free and determined and she had decided she was going to make her own way in the world, just as well as any of her brothers might. She'd been a sort of feminist before it became fashionable; never had much time for all that sisterly stuff, but she was positive she was as good as any man and she'd prove it… And marrying Ferg had seemed like an extra boost to her life-plan. London had been exciting, but she had not shone out there, she felt, the way she had here. She had never felt any affection for the place and had made no friends there she would miss; and anyway, she would find fields to conquer up here, coming home triumphant to wed the lord of the manor.
But it had not been as she had imagined. She had expected to be the centre of things in Gallanach, but the McHoans as a family had so many other things happening to them; she had felt peripheral. The Urvills" own history, too, made her feel like something unimportant on the family tree, for all that Fergus talked of responsibility and duty and one's debt to the next generation.
She was a leaf, expendable. A twig — maybe — at best.
Somehow all her dreams had disappeared. It seemed to her now that all she had ever had had been the dream of having dreams; the goal of having goals one day, once she had made up her mind what it was she wanted.
But that had never happened. First Fergus, then the twins, then her own small part in the society of the town and the people there, and in the wider, still circumferential concerns of this wee country's middle-to-ruling classes, and in the more dissipated commonwealth of mildly powerful people who were their peers beyond that — in England, on the continent, from the States and elsewhere — took up her time, sapped her will and replaced her own concerns with theirs.
So now, she thought, I am married to a man whose touch disgusts me, and who anyway does not seem to want to touch me. She looked at Fergus's dim reflection, distorted in the glass, then tried to re-focus on her own image. Can he find me as repellent as I find him? I can't look that bad, can I? A few grey hairs, but you don't notice them; still a size twelve, and I've looked after myself. I look good in this, your standard little black number, and I still get into a tight pair of jeans… What's wrong with me? What did I do? Why does he have to spend half his time with that drunken, brassy bitch?