Weekend Read Free Page B

funeral oration you gave.’
    ‘It was meant to be about the future as well as the past.’
    ‘I know, I know. It’s all right for you. You’ve still got most of your forties to come,’ Dan said.
    ‘Uh-huh. But what am I doing with them?’
    It was a remark thrown out casually that came back to attack him. He was mugged by his own question. While Dan reminisced gently, he found himself trapped among thoughts the question had released in him. His part in the conversation became mainly nods and vague sounds of assent.
    What
was
he doing with his forties? He sometimes felt his nature was a beast he hadn’t learned to domesticate. It did what it wanted rather than what he tried to train it to do.
    ‘Remember the party we had when your first novel came out,’ Dan said. ‘That was an event.’
    ‘It was.’
    And thanks for giving me a memory I don’t need at the moment. How many years ago was that? Fifteen? Sixteen? It was in a wine bar which had since disappeared. Passing the place where it used to be, he sometimes wondered if he had dreamed it. It was a Pizzaland now. He certainly seemed to have dreamed the possibilities with which he had sensed the place shimmering that evening.
    Lodgings in Eden
had been out for three weeks then. He had decided to wait before having the party in case the book sank without trace and people wouldn’t know what they were supposed to be celebrating. But all the reviews that were in had been good. The book had reached number nine in a bestseller list. Since he had never again appeared on any such list, he had, of course, realised that they were things of noserious significance. But then that entry at nine had seemed an omen of a bright future.
    So many other things that evening had supported the feeling. He was standing among a lot of people who were happy for him and wishing him well. He was twenty-eight. He had already written a book that he was entitled to call, however briefly, a bestseller. Maggi was still with him and they had plans to choose somewhere to live where she could take a job teaching and he could write his next book. The publishers were happy and waiting for it. He had ideas for evermore. If this was what he could achieve at the first attempt, what might he be able to do over the next few years?
    Not a lot, as it transpired. He still couldn’t understand it. How had something as solid as that moment turned into a mirage? Perhaps the first thing he had done wrong was to work so hard on the second novel. Perhaps success, like some women, is turned off by being courted too abjectly. It took six years for him to deliver
Winter in August
. When it was finally published, it felt like his second first novel, so long had it come after
Lodgings in Eden
. It emerged to a thunderous silence. Something in him died with the book.
    His confidence was broken. It was as if another Columbus had set out to discover new worlds and landed on Rockall. The bleakness of where he found himself spread like a blight into the lives around him. He didn’t blame Maggi for leaving him. If he could have found the way to do it, he would have parted with himself. He made a half-hearted attempt at it by leaving Skye and coming back to Glasgow. But he brought his dead ambition with him, like a corpse in a suitcase. He unpacked it with his clothes and had sat staring at it for years, willing it to breathe again.
    But the book of short stories he had published five yearslater merely reaffirmed where he thought he was – trapped in a fantasy of his own making. They could have sold more copies of
In Places at the Time
if he had gone round the houses with them. He almost did.
    He knew his reaction to his own failure was exaggerated but he couldn’t control it. Since his teens he had invested almost all his hopes in being a writer, and the high of his brief initial success had been so intense that he couldn’t adjust to the experience of coming down. He seemed to have spent the time since the failure