Read Weekend for Free Online Page B

needed. All that was lacking now was the will to begin to use them, the purpose for applying them. Maybe this weekend would help her find it. She rose, took the cup and went to the kitchen to rinse it out.
    She went back and sat down on the couch beside the coffee-table. She hoped she had given some reassurance to Vikki, who was so vulnerable just now. But then the operation next week was not something any woman could face with equanimity, especially for someone who, as an only child with her parents dead, had no immediate family.
    Vikki was being very brave about it. This weekend was to be her last outing before surgery. As far as Marion was aware, she was the only one Vikki had told about it.
    It was interesting how much she knew about the people who were going to Willowvale. Perhaps seeing her as the Mouse (they had never called her that to her face but she was good at eavesdropping), people felt free to say almost anything in front of her. Perhaps they liked to feel they were shocking her. They weren’t. Nothing about people shocked her. Every horror she read about in the newspaper or saw on television she liked to confront calmly because it was telling her the way things were. She had always sent her imagination into situations and experiences she had never known herself, so that she could feel what others felt.
    She knew the story of Jacqui Forsyth’s break-up with the apparently appalling Kevin. She suspected from certainremarks Alison Miller had made that she had been involved with David Cudlipp at last year’s weekend. She knew that Andrew Lawson’s life outside university was devoted to his wife, who was housebound with illness. Devoted to her and the bottle, she suspected.
    She thought of them a lot. She thought most of Harry Beck. That was inevitable, given that the key to his writing class was mutual honesty, and he led by example. She knew that he had had problems with the book he was working on.
    ‘I think I’ve discovered a new neurosis. The Penelope Syndrome. You heard of her? She was the wife of Odysseus. While she was waiting for him to get back from Troy … Twenty years it took in all. How do you explain that one to your wife? “That was some traffic jam on the M1.” She was pestered by men who wanted to marry her. Eventually she had to give them a time-limit. She said she would choose a new husband when she finished the tapestry she was working on. Every day they could see her weaving it. Every night she unravelled in secret what she had done during the day. The never-ending tapestry. That’s me. Every night my head unravels my belief in what I’ve written during the day. Just call me Penelope. But not in public, please.’
    He had finished it now and had submitted it to a publisher. She had read all his published work, finding his books on Amazon with great difficulty, and that told you a lot about a person, she felt. She had seen him once in a bar called the Ubiquitous Chip. He hadn’t noticed her, of course. But the company he was in had dismayed her. One man in particular looked like a caricature of an aging gigolo. But there was more to Harry Beck than that. Most of the notes on the table in front of her were transcriptions of things he had said.
    ‘Does it matter? A day or a lifetime. Or one crowded hourof glorious life. I suppose every book creates its own wilful timescale. Certainly, you can’t tell a story without it inhabiting time. Once upon a time, as they used to say. I suppose every story really begins: It was that time when …’ There was a pause. ‘Of course, you could get twenty different people writing about the same event and using that beginning. And still have twenty different stories.’
    She leafed through some of her other notes, transcriptions she had extracted from his tutorials, which he had allowed her to tape. She had taken them mainly from the free-ranging chats they always had at the end of a class. She liked those times best. Usually then, with assignments