On the Heroism of Mortals by Allan Cameron

Author:Allan Cameron [Allan Cameron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908251107
Publisher: Vagabond Voices
Published: 2012-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

When she studied him in his hospital bed, she found it very difficult to feel sorry for him, although he made up for that by feeling very sorry for himself. He looked absurd. Like the giant who fell from the beanstalk, but with less right to complain, she thought. Nevertheless, he did, although he interspersed his lamentations with pleas for her understanding. “Don’t leave me. I couldn’t manage without you. This may seem strange, but I couldn’t live without you and it has not been easy for me to admit that. I shouldn’t have hit you; I know that now. But then again, you shouldn’t provoke me. I’m not someone to provoke, you know,” he said simply.

But the simplicity didn’t work. He revolted her. Dear God, did life have to be this difficult, she thought, though she was not a religious woman. Indeed her values very much reflected her own times, so how come she had ended up in a situation that belonged to a different age? He was, she told herself endlessly, the father of their son who’d been killed in a hit-and-run incident at the age of eleven. He’d been abusive before that, but the death of his child had made things worse. Was he also a victim? In that moment, she thought not.

He had not been a good father. Detached and ambitious at the time, he seemed hardly to notice the boy, but no doubt his son was an important part of his identity. Dealing with her husband’s pain had distracted her from her own. That was a kind of balm. But then again she failed there too. He started to drink heavily and eventually lost his job. There had always been something theatrical about her husband: his booming voice in a slightly exaggerated upper-class accent, his flamboyant dress, his long, Oscar Wilde locks and, most of all, his absolute belief in the importance of what he had to say. He projected himself onto others as though they were a screen – an inanimate object that served to reflect his glorious self. This character might be defined as Churchillian, but somewhere along the thread of his life it took a different turn: it lacked the public element of the statesman, which might mean that at least he didn’t suffer from megalomania or might mean, more simply, that his horizons were more limited. Beneath the bluff exterior, some detected a weakness, a terror, a lack of self-belief rather than a surfeit. She often thought that, and it was the only thing she loved about him. Her love then was based on a doubtful hypothesis, as she well knew. The precision of her analysis did not help her to make sensible decisions.

A policeman had come round to tell her that they would not be pressing charges. He explained that her husband had been insistent on dropping the case, but the police could still have proceeded. Given, however, her husband’s insistence and his repeated claim that the marriage could survive the violent encounter, the procurator fiscal had decided to drop the case.

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