I feel as if I am waiting for something but I have no idea what that might be. I think I have been waiting all my life, waiting for someone to find me – a grandfather to claim me as his kin or the ghost of my father to appear and tell me his story. On the Oban birth certificate (a forgery, Nora confesses blithely) he is ‘unknown’, an anonymous person who seemed to have somehow slipped from Nora’s memory, a man who made so little impression on her that she couldn’t always be sure of his name and when I asked about him as a child she would say he was called Jimmy, sometimes Jack, occasionally even ‘Ernie’. Any Tom, Dick or Harry would do apparently.
~ He could have been anyone, she says stoutly.
‘He must have been someone.’
The dead sometimes forget the living but the living rarely forget the dead. Not, however, in the case of my father. Half of what made me is completely missing – the forensics of my father a mystery. In their absence I am free to imagine him, but, unfortunately, even in my imagination he is leaving – on the deck of a ship, at the wheel of a car or leaning out of the window of a train carriage, his face obscured by clouds of steam from the engine.
From the occasional careless remark on Nora’s part during my childhood, I deduced that our moneyless, itinerant existence in the Sea Views and Sailor’s Rests of the English seaside was not the life that Nora had been born to. I wondered if perhaps Nora had got with child through a secret passion – impregnated by some black-hearted scoundrel, a passing vagabond perhaps, a groom in the stables or a gypsy in a wood – and that her angry father had thrown her out of the family home to find her own way in the world. I imagined her locked out in the cold and the driven snow, giving birth to me – her bastard daughter – in some freezing hovel.
‘Was it like that?’ I ask her, as I have asked her many times before.
Nora looks at me thoughtfully.
~ Not exactly, she says.
I dreamt that one day Nora’s father – chastened and forgiving – would find me and claim me as granddaughter and heir, and I would be restored to my rightful place in a world where people stay in one place and sleep in their own beds at night and avoid unnecessary journeys. Of course, life is composed almost entirely of journeys, necessary and unnecessary, but mostly unnecessary in my opinion.
I am waiting for Nora to give myself to me, to tell me about the time before my memory began, before I myself began.
‘Perhaps you could start with Douglas,’ I prompt her.
~ Who?
‘Your brother.’
But she’s already gone, striding across the cliff-top towards the house.
‘What about the Professor?’
‘The who?’
Archie finished off the shepherd’s pie and started truffling around in the fridge again, finally retrieving a plate of leftover roast chicken and Brussels sprouts. I never ate anything from the McCues’ fridge when I was babysitting, there were things lurking in there that I recognized from two years ago – rancid dairy products and strange life forms blooming and reproducing in old Mason jars. Philippa, a Girton old girl and a part-time lecturer in the Philosophy department, was the slapdash sort and kept a remarkably filthy house.
Philippa had also recently become infected with the writing sickness and had embarked on her own novel – a doctor/nurse romance (The Wards of Love) in which the heroine bore the unlikely name of ‘Flick’ and which Philippa was intending to send to Mills & Boon. The large farmhouse table in the kitchen seemed to be acting as Philippa’s desk – it was littered with papers, unmarked essays and textbooks. Philippa’s surprisingly neat philosopher’s hand was much in evidence, particularly on a great sheaf of narrow-lined foolscap, the aguish aura of which suggested it must be her novel.
Words peeled off the page – hair the colour of a field of ripe wheat . . . eyes like drops from the bottomless depths of an azure ocean – and rained onto the Nairn cushion vinyl. The McCues’ dog, Duke, pattered into the kitchen. Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.
Duke sniffed around the floor looking for something to eat other than words; the kitchen floor usually rendered up any number of food deposits. Today there was a raw egg that someone had dropped and not bothered to clean up. Duke licked up the egg with one sweep of his tongue, skilfully avoiding the broken shell, and then sat down heavily as if his legs had given way and drooled at the chicken drumstick that Archie was gnawing on like a caveman.
Adding to the general air of disarray in the McCue household were a number of animals. In descending order of size after Duke these were: a hefty cat called Goneril; a Dutch rabbit (Dorothea); a guinea-pig (Bramwell); and, finally, a hamster called McFluffy who was replaced by a new McFluffy every few months whenever the old McFluffy was either eaten by Goneril, trodden on by Philippa or sat on by Duke (or vice versa). A considerable number of McFluffies had simply packed their pouches and escaped from prison, disappearing into the innards of the house, so that behind the wainscoting and under the floorboards there now lived a tribe of feral hamsters conducting guerrilla warfare against the McCue household.
The current McFluffy was sleeping in a nest of shredded Evening Telegraphs, in a cage in the corner of the kitchen. The cage was precariously balanced on top of a Christmas-sized tin of Quality Street, containing five years of unfiled household receipts, and a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
Goneril slunk into the kitchen and wound her body like a fat skein of wool around my feet. A piebald queen whose white patches had grown a urine-yellow, like the pelt of an old polar bear, Goneril was an unattractive cat with dead fish breath and slovenly habits that she’d probably caught off Philippa. She was a cat who liked no-one, especially not Crispin, not after an unfortunate accident involving a tab of acid and a tin of Kit-E-Kat during his last long vacation.
Archie put his plate in the sink, already overloaded with dirty plates, burnt baking trays and Pyrex dishes that had acquired an unsavoury patina from years of McCue cooking. On the dull stainless-steel draining-board a huge raw salmon was laid out as if waiting for a post mortem.
‘We’re having a party,’ Archie said, indicating the salmon, rather morosely. It didn’t look like a party-going sort of fish; its silver-lamé scales may have gleamed under the kitchen lights but its dead eye was lustreless and fixed and it had leaked blood onto the draining board. The cat made a great pretence of not seeing the fish.
‘Yes,’ Philippa shouted suddenly from the hallway, ‘Effie should come to the party.’ She appeared in person in the kitchen doorway a few seconds later, carrying a giant-sized tin of dog food. She smelt vaguely of lard. At the sight of the dog food, Duke changed his dribbling allegiance from one spouse to the other, worshipping at Philippa’s big feet like a slavering Sphinx.
‘A few students at the party would be a good idea,’ Philippa said to Archie.
‘Why?’ he asked doubtfully.
‘Because,’ Philippa said impatiently, ‘being popular with students looks good.’
‘Does it?’ Archie said, looking even more doubtful.
‘Bring a friend,’ Philippa said imperiously to me. She would have made a good wife for Macbeth; she certainly wouldn’t have fretted about a few blood spots.
Philippa’s physique was remarkably similar to Duke’s, although, unlike Duke, Philippa was wearing a kaftan. She hadn’t got round to buttoning up the front properly and her jaded, wrinkled bra was visible as well as quite a lot of jaded, wrinkled breast. The hem of the kaftan ended mid-calf, thus revealing Philippa’s unshaven legs, bare despite the inclement weather, growing stoutly out of a pair of red leather clogs that looked as if they were on the run from something Grimm. Philippa had dramatic badger hair – black with a swathe of white through it – which tonight she was wearing in a long squaw braid.
She was quite an embarrassing sort of person really, constantly referring to menstruation and sponge tampons and vaginal examinations so that she made women’s health sound like car maintenance. A stalwart of the university women’s liberation group, she was always urging us to examine our genitals in hand mirrors and stop shaving our body hair.
‘Right,’ Philippa said, making her way to the front door with Archie, myself and assorted animals tailing after her, ‘there’s food in the fridge if you get hungry, Effie, no sweets for Maisie, make her do homework, remember no television – except Tomorrow’s World because that’s educational, sort of, but she has to go to bed straight afterwards – the Dean’s phone number’s on the table if you have an emergency.’ Finally rattling to a stop, Philippa shrugged herself into an enormous Mexican-style poncho. She was still clutching the tin of dog food and I wondered if she was taking it with her to the party instead of a bottle of wine. Or just trying to drive Duke to the brink of insanity – a state of mind you had to judge, not from his expression of terminal canine ennui, but from the amount of dog slobber he was producing.
Archie, meanwhile, was admiring himself in the hall mirror, smoothing his hair and adjusting his tasteless kipper tie. Despite having a physical resemblance to a large sea-mammal, Archie was under the impression that he was attractive to women, which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, he was. (‘Maybe you’re not a woman?’ Andrea suggested.)
‘Of course,’ Archie said to me, via the medium of the mirror, ‘I don’t believe in bourgeois crap like dinner parties, it’s just a means to an end. Right,’ he said, finally satisfied with his appearance, ‘I’ll be off. Don’t take any nonsense from you know who.’
‘Who?’
‘You know,’ Philippa said. ‘The old mare.’ (Or at least, that was what it sounded like.) She was halfway down the path by now and she turned and shouted, ‘Catch!’ and bowled the tin of dog food underarm to me. Philippa had once been captain of Cheltenham Ladies’ College cricket team. And somehow she still was.
Maisie’s full name was Maisie Ophelia. I can’t help but think that it’s an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn’t bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it’s true they are much harder to find. (‘Ratty’ and ‘Mole’ are Maisie’s suggestions.)
‘Do you have homework?’ I asked her.
‘Not really,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the television.
‘I do,’ I said gloomily, taking George Eliot out of my bag. I commenced to write very slowly – James’s judgement that Middlemarch is an ‘indifferent whole’ is refuted by even a superficial reading of the novel, when we cannot help but be struck by the highly wrought nature of the writing, the function of character, the careful thematic structuring and the balancing and illusion of autogenesis, something for which the paralleling of action and moral consequence – but then I must have fallen asleep again because the next thing I knew I was being rudely awoken by a scream and it was a little while before I understood that the scream had come from the television set, rather than one of the various inhabitants of the house.
Maisie was deeply engrossed in a black-and-white horror film of some kind. The woman who was screaming – tall and blond with her hair in a perfect French pleat and apparently called Irma – seemed to have realized (rather late in the day) that she had stopped for the night at a bed and breakfast run by a vampire, even though you would have thought, as B and B names go, ‘Castle Vlad’ wasn’t exactly ‘Sea View’ or ‘The Pines’.
‘She’s really thick,’ Maisie said admiringly.
I tried to shift position; I was incredibly uncomfortable – Duke was slumped heavily on my feet while curled up in my lap, like a large evil netsuke, was Goneril. Not only that, but Maisie’s bony body was sticking into me on one side, while on my other side, an old woman I had never seen before was fast asleep, her head lolling uncomfortably on my shoulder.
The old woman had skin that was the texture and colour of white marshmallows and in a poor light (which was always) you might have mistaken her hair for a cloud of slightly rotten candyfloss. Although fast asleep, she was still clutching a pair of knitting needles on which hung a strange shapeless thing, like a web woven by a spider on drugs. She looked so peaceful it seemed a shame to wake her up.
‘Maisie?’ I said quietly.
‘Mm?’
‘There’s an old woman on the sofa with us.’
Maisie tore her eyes away from the television to lean over and look and said, ‘It’s just Granny.’
‘Granny?’
‘My dad’s mum.’ (How strangely complicated that sounded.)
Surely she was supposed to be in The Anchorage in Newport-on-Tay, looking at the water?
‘She escaped,’ Maisie said.
Now that I looked at her I could see that Mrs McCue looked vaguely familiar. Despite Andrea’s belief that ‘all old people look alike’ I thought I recognized her from the shoal of mourners at ‘Senga’s’ funeral that afternoon. Mrs McCue woke up and automatically began to knit. After a while she stopped and sighed and, looking at me with yellowing rheumy eyes, said wistfully, ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’ She seemed to be altogether from the jaundiced end of the spectrum – the whites of her eyes were the colour of Milky Bars and her horsy teeth resembled blank Scrabble tiles.
It seemed churlish not to comply with her heartfelt request and so I levered Duke off my feet – no easy task – shoogled Goneril off my knee as gently as I could to avoid being bitten, and finally struggled free of the bookending bodies of Maisie and the dowager Mrs McCue, who both immediately shifted to fill the space I’d vacated.
While the kettle was coming to the boil I went to the toilet—
Ignore her, she is in a bad mood today. She is avoiding telling her story.
It turned out to be a boy – more a man really – who was lying on the bed, as still as a corpse. He was a very fine specimen of his sex – just the right shape and size, with no strange features or disturbing blemishes, only a rather fetching scar on his left cheekbone as if he had been raked delicately by a tiger’s talon. If it hadn’t been for the snoring you would have thought him dead.
I wondered who he was (how helpful it would be if people were labelled). His hair was dark, his skin pale, his lashes long, and you might have thought that his lips – carved into a curving pout by Cupid himself and slightly damp from sleep – were waiting to be kissed. But I didn’t do that, because that would have been like asking for trouble instead of simply waiting for it to arrive in its own good time.
He was lying on top of the covers and although his feet were naked, the rest of him was fully clothed in a pair of Levi’s, an old sweater and a battered leather biker’s jacket that indicated a darker and more interesting personality than Bob’s army greatcoat or Shug’s Afghan ever could. I sniffed the lanolin of his rough wool sweater and the slaughtered smell of his jacket. I inspected his ears (clean, shell-like), his fingernails (dirty, bitten), the faint tidemark of grime on his neck, the ingrained oil on his mechanic’s hands, inhaled the faint aroma of marijuana on his breath.
He smelt like a Platonic ideal of a man would smell. Compared to the slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails that composed Bob’s biodynamic, he seemed to be made up of entirely testosterone-based ingredients – leather car seats, cut-throat razors, ropes and knots and binding cords, salt, mud and blood. He was all . . . other.
I wondered what colour his eyes were beneath those gorgeous sleepy lids. Of course, for all I knew he was squint and cross-eyed, or worse – a blue-eyed man. I thought about prising open one of his semi-comatose eyelids but decided against it. Was it possible to tell his character from his appearance? He looked sublime but he might have been any one of a hundred undesirable things. A university lecturer, for example. Perhaps he was a thief who had come in through the window and had grown tired in the middle of his thieving and lain down for a rest. More unlikely things happen every day, after all.
The window was wide open and the temperature in the room must have been near freezing. The unknown man’s feet were turning blue and felt icy to the touch, more like cold corpse flesh than the appendages of a warm and breathing man. Hastily, I pulled a blanket over his motionless form. He was sleeping on his back with his arms and legs flung out like a dead starfish – although with fewer legs. (Or arms, or whatever it is that starfish have.) He didn’t look as if he was on a harmless date with the Sandman, but more as if he was stranded in the Land of Nod for ever with no map and compass of return and I wondered if I shouldn’t keep watch over him for a while, but, sadly, there is only so much pleasure to be got from observing a sleeping man – even a handsome one – and I was soon distracted by the sight of a very fat manuscript poking out from under the bed.
The edges of many of the pages appeared to have been nibbled by small animals – clan McFluffy, I presumed – and the title page announced it to be Archie’s great novel, The Expanding Prism of J.
‘Well,’ I said to the sleeping man, ‘I don’t see what harm there can be in just taking a look.’ Words which, as we know, everyone lives to regret (Pandora, curious cats, Lot’s wife, all of Bluebeard’s wives, and so many, many others).
The Expanding Prism of J appeared to be a novel with neither plot nor character (and certainly no pictures). Even the simplest details were cloaked in a claggy syntax, and reading Archie’s prose was like trying to make sense of glue. As far as I could gather, the eponymous J was a university lecturer employed in an institution more tortuous than a Borgesian labyrinth. J himself had no fixed or true character but was a man made up of layer upon layer of impenetrable metaphor and alienated asides. Struggling through the dense language of the first few pages, it took me some time to realize that J was not riding through a Mitteleuropean city on a tram but was indulging in something quite perverse with his mistress’s lapdog. I began to feel slightly nauseous and wondered if Archie’s words might be having a toxic effect. Perhaps if I looked further under the bed I would find small dead animals.
Despite the number of words, nothing really seemed to happen, although after a while J’s paranoia began to produce a kind of mirage of a plot, as if something was about to happen at every moment and yet never did. A typical paragraph (for there was little to choose between them) read like this –
J felt a tenuous uncertainty as to which of the several tenebrous passages his presumed tormentor had chosen to disappear into. He permitted his imagination a brief glance down into that darkness to find what it would, but recoiled from the sudden vista of – not despair and madness as he had expected, but rather the torpor and enervation to be found there. He was made fully aware now of the kind of horror that his mental games had led him to and speculated as to the –
And so on and so on. No wonder the sleeper on the bed was in such a sopor, breathing in Archie’s somnifaciant words all the time. A sudden gust of wind lifted the curtains and sent an icy blast into the room, ruffling the pages of Archie’s novel and sending several of them flying through the air like autumn leaves. I jumped up and chased around the room after them and managed to retrieve all but one, which floated serenely out of the window like a birdless wing.
I tried to get the manuscript back into some semblance of order but the pages, for some annoying reason, were not numbered so that it was impossible to tell what sequence they should be in and the sense of the text gave me no clue whatsoever. At a loss, I skimmed the page in my hand and discovered J in the process of meeting a nasty death. He was at the top of a flight of stairs when a banister he was leaning against gave way and sent him plunging down into the dark depths of a stairwell –
Falling, falling, into the dark depths of the unknown and unknowable chasm, the abyss of his own imagination rushing to greet him, to enfold, to smother him, the darkness circumscribing him, obfuscating his senses and finally stilling even the faintest glimmerings of cognizance and speculation –
Which I think meant he was dead. There was no knowing where this particular page belonged as Archie was obviously the kind of writer who thought nothing of killing off his main protagonist within the first fifty pages. In the end I just put all the pages back together at random and stuck them as far under the bed as they would go.
Another gust of wind sent a sudden chill shudder through the sleeping body on the bed. I pulled the blanket up further and closed the window—
I don’t think Nora should talk about sensible, not when she herself is standing on a rock that is being lapped by an incoming tide as if she is trying to command the sea.
The water in the kettle had almost boiled away by the time I got back to the kitchen and I had to start the tea-making process all over again—
When this one saw me, she gave a little scream and clutched her breast. ‘Wha’ a fleg you gave me,’ she said. She was as small as a dormouse and almost entirely spherical, you could probably have rolled her from one side of the kitchen to the other. She heaved herself up from the chair, with the help of a walking-aid, and introduced herself as ‘Mrs Macbeth’. I gathered she was Mrs McCue’s friend and a fellow escapee from The Anchorage.
Mrs Macbeth was being followed around by an old fat Westie which seemed almost as lame as its owner. Its fur was a Chinese yellow and it seemed to have gone rusty around the mouth. Its teeth were as yellow as Mrs McCue’s and in some strange way it reminded me a little of her. Its aged eyes – one brown, one slightly wall-eyed – looked at me in a resigned kind of way when I addressed it.
‘She’s cried Janet,’ Mrs Macbeth said. ‘We’re no allowed pets at The Anchorage, but I couldna get rid of her, she’s been my wee pal all these years.’ She sighed and Janet seemed to sigh too, her lungs wheezing like a tiny pair of accordions.
‘So you hide her?’ I asked, trying to imagine the complexities of keeping a small dog hidden.
‘Aye, it’s a rare carry-on,’ Mrs Macbeth agreed. ‘The keech’s the worst thing, of course.’
The pair of them followed me back into the living-room, Mrs Macbeth insisting on carrying a box of Tunnock’s Teacakes, despite being hampered by the walking-frame. The old dog hobbled after her and when Duke caught sight of her he struggled up from the dead dog position he’d adopted on the floor and sniffed poor Janet’s rear end with bizarre enthusiasm.
‘Who is the man in the spare bedroom?’ I asked Maisie.
‘Ferdinand.’
‘Ferdinand? Your brother Ferdinand? I thought he was in prison?’
‘Early release for good behaviour,’ Maisie said, not taking her eyes off the television, which was now showing some kind of curling championship.
‘Irma escaped from Castle Vlad and went home,’ Mrs McCue said helpfully to me. ‘Ferdinand’s a good boy really,’ she added, nodding her old sweetie-selling head at me. Mrs Macbeth’s old dog flopped down heavily on its side and fell asleep immediately, making a strange creaking noise when it breathed.
Mrs McCue inspected the inside of her teacup and frowned. At her feet she had a large sack-like bag, made from some kind of chintzy material. The bag looked as if it contained a dead animal – a middle-sized one, a hyena perhaps – but when she turned it out, proved to contain everything imaginable except a hyena. Eventually she found what she was looking for – a handkerchief, a little lacy thing with bluebells embroidered all over it, and cleaned the cup, rubbing it vigorously with the handkerchief.
‘That woman keeps a clarty house, there’s stour everywhere,’ she said to Mrs Macbeth, who gave a little shiver and said, rather enigmatically, ‘The flair.’
‘I’m an affie tea-jenny,’ Mrs McCue said, pouring the tea in an unsteady stream from the heavy brown pot.
‘Me as well,’ Mrs Macbeth agreed.
‘Why was Ferdinand in prison if he was such a good boy?’ I persisted.
Mrs McCue shrugged. ‘Who knows? That’s a rare cuppie,’ she said to Mrs Macbeth. Mrs McCue was managing to drink her tea, knit and read the Sunday Post all at the same time.
‘Mistaken identity,’ Maisie said through a mouthful of teacake.
Mrs McCue reached into her chintz sack again, and produced a large bag of Iced Gems which turned out to be soft but we ate them anyway. Then she produced a packet of Player’s No.6 and offered them round. ‘I only smoke for the coupons,’ she told me, shaking a cigarette out of the packet for Mrs Macbeth.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ Mrs Macbeth said and they both lit up. Maisie coughed theatrically and Mrs McCue delved into the bag again and came up with a packet of Tyrozets for Maisie.
‘A’thing but the kitchen sink,’ Mrs Macbeth said, nodding approvingly at the bag.
As soon as I sat down Goneril leapt back onto me, kneading my chest with her claws. She was an extraordinarily heavy cat – if the Tara-Zanthians got hold of her they’d probably keep her in a safe deposit box. As soon as we were all nicely settled the doorbell rang suddenly (how else?), a simple enough event but one which set in motion an alarming amount of chaos – Duke barked his way to the door, a clumsy process which involved treading on Janet, knocking over the milk jug and sending Goneril in a death-defying leap from my lap to that of Archie’s mother who gave a little scream of horror and dropped an entire needleful of stitches from her erratically woven web. Thank goodness there was no baby to wake up – the usual conclusion to this kind of chain of events.
After all that commotion it was irritating to discover that there was no-one there when I opened the front door. The entire street was hushed and deserted, not even The Boy With No Name, just howling winds and freezing rain.
As soon as I sat down the doorbell rang again. How boring this was.
‘Let me go,’ Mrs Macbeth insisted, heaving herself out of her chair with enormous difficulty and zimmering to the front door. She hirpled back – looking smaller than ever – with a waterlogged Kevin, his hayseed hair plastered to his head by the rain. Since lunchtime he’d developed a huge pimple in the middle of his forehead, like an angry caste-mark.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked by way of greeting.
‘Babysitting,’ I said, which wasn’t, technically speaking, quite true, as I seemed to be sitting everything except a baby. He followed me into the living-room and sat down, looking awkward in the presence of so many women at different stages of their lives. He stared at Mrs McCue’s feet, securely encased in bootee slippers with sturdy zips. Mrs McCue glanced down at her feet to see if there was anything interesting about them.
‘That’s some plook you’ve got, son,’ Mrs Macbeth complimented him.
‘Thank you,’ Kevin said, slightly confused. He blew his nose to cover his awkwardness – a large trumpeting noise that unsettled the already too-twitchy cat – and then sat his acreage of flesh down heavily in an armchair (which is just how small rodents are unwittingly killed). Maisie strained to watch the progress of a curling-stone across a television screen that was being partly blocked by the bulk of Kevin’s body.
‘I came to talk to Dr McCue,’ Kevin said, inspecting the contents of his handkerchief.
‘He’s not here.’
‘I can see that.’
Like everyone else of my acquaintance, Kevin was looking for an extension on the deadline for his dissertation (on The Lord of the Rings, naturally). ‘I’ve been spending too much time in Edrakonia,’ Kevin said, a look of wistfulness passing over his face at the very mention of the place. The spot in the middle of his forehead glowed. ‘The dragons have been mustering their forces for a spot of counter-insurgency.’
‘The dragons?’ Mrs Macbeth echoed, glancing warily around the room.
‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her, ‘only Kevin can see them.’ Kevin was eating Iced Gems by the handful, in a mindless way that would have disturbed Andrea.
‘Explain something to me,’ I said to him, because, to my irritation, I took a strange interest in Edrakonia. ‘I can’t understand whether the dragons are good or bad.’
‘Well,’ Kevin said earnestly, ‘historically, the dragons of Edrakonia do have their own system of ethics, but you have to remember, of course, that it’s a school of moral philosophy of an essentially dragonish nature and the ordinary mortal – you, for example – wouldn’t recognize it as containing the simple tenets of “good” and “bad” which, for dragons, are—’
‘OK, Kevin, that’s enough.’
For some reason Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth got quite excited when Kevin told them he was ‘a writer’ and started urging him to read something to them. Kevin always carried his writing around with him, bits of papers like talismans.
‘Well,’ he said doubtfully, ‘I’m in the middle of a chapter, and it’s the fourth book, so I don’t know if you’ll understand what’s going on.’
‘It disnae matter,’ Mrs Macbeth said, ‘the beginning, the middle, the end – it makes no difference.’ She would do well in Archie’s class.
‘Just fill us in quickly,’ Mrs McCue encouraged, ‘you know – characters, a wee bittie plot and we’ll soon get the hang of it.’
‘Is there going to be a moral to it?’ Mrs Macbeth asked.
‘Well, everything’s got a moral,’ I said, ‘if only you can find it.’
Kevin hesitated.
‘Just begin at the beginning,’ Mrs McCue coaxed.
‘And carry on until you’ve finished,’ Mrs Macbeth added.
After a short resumé (And the Murk will fall on the land. And the Beast Griddlebart will roam the land and the dragons will flee), Kevin settled down and began to narrate in a portentous tone, undermined somewhat by the clotted cream of his accent: ‘Duke Thar-Vint of Malkaron mounted his steed Demaal and prepared himself mentally for the long journey. His trusty steward Lart rode beside him on one of the sure-footed shaggy brown ponies bred by the horse breeders of the Mountains of Galinth—’
‘Are the mountains a good place to breed horses?’ Mrs McCue asked thoughtfully.
‘Well, it’s a good place to breed sure-footed ones,’ Kevin said irritably. ‘Can I continue?’
‘Aye, on you go, son.’
‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said impatiently. ‘Thar-Vint’s thoughts strayed to the great palace of Calysveron and the Lady Agaruitha to whom he was secretly betrothed, despite the objections of her mother the Lady Tamarin—’
‘Lady Agga who?’ Mrs Macbeth said.
‘Agaruitha – A-g-a-r-u-i-t-h-a.’
I wondered how much time Kevin devoted to making up these ridiculous names. Quite a lot, I suspected. (Or, on the other hand, not much time at all.)
‘It sounds . . . historical,’ Mrs Macbeth said, ‘it’s not a word you hear often these days.’
‘That’s because men dinnae wear hats the way they used to,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘There were times,’ she said to Maisie, ‘when hats had names – the trilby, the fedora—’
‘Homburg,’ Mrs Macbeth offered, ‘the porkpie.’
‘The porkpie?’ Kevin queried doubtfully.
‘Yes indeed,’ Mrs McCue affirmed, ‘the Glengarry, the bowler, a nice Panama in the summer.’
‘Doff,’ Mrs Macbeth said dreamily, ‘doff, doff, doff. The more you say it the dafter it sounds.’
‘It would be a good name for a dog,’ Mrs McCue said, looking at Janet noisily asleep at Mrs Macbeth’s feet.
‘Do you mind . . .’ Kevin said. ‘And spurred his steed away to . . .’ I nodded off. I think I preferred it when Kevin was writing about the dragons.
When I woke up he had gone.
‘What a tube,’ Maisie said and Mrs McCue agreed. ‘Aye a gey queer laddie,’ she said.
‘Mr Macbeth’. How odd that sounded, as if the Thane of Cawdor had decided to give up on ambition and settled in the suburbs and worked towards his pension.
‘It all seems like yesterday,’ she concluded sadly.
‘Aye, you dinnae age inside,’ Mrs McCue said; ‘inside you’re aye young.’
‘How young?’ Maisie asked.
‘Twenty-one,’ Mrs McCue said.
‘Twenty-five,’ Mrs Macbeth said.
But you must excuse my mother, she has led a very strange life.
‘Mistaken identity,’ she said. How grisly these preoccupations seemed for people with a view of the water. Something, Mrs McCue said, was killing the old people. Not just old age then? I asked.
‘No,’ Mrs McCue said airily, waving her knitting needles about in a dangerous fashion, ‘I know for a fact that someone’s trying to kill me.’
‘Oh aye,’ Mrs Macbeth said cheerfully, ‘me too.’ I thought of Professor Cousins who had said exactly the same thing to me only this morning (what an incredibly long day it was turning out to be).
‘Just because you’re paranoid,’ I said to Mrs McCue, ‘it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ She gave me a worried look.
‘So who do you think’s trying to kill you?’ Maisie asked, finally finding a topic of conversation more interesting than television. ‘Dad?’
Mrs McCue laughed and said fondly, ‘Archie disnae have the balls for murder.’
‘Look at poor Senga,’ Mrs Macbeth said, shaking her head.
‘Face like a tatti-howker, but a harmless wee wifie,’ Mrs McCue said.
‘Do you really think she was murdered?’ Maisie asked, a thrill of excitement in her voice, but at that crucial dramatic moment we were interrupted (naturally) and the noise of the front door being unlocked set in train the usual commotion of barking dogs, hissing cats and dropped stitches. Mrs McCue cocked her head like a dog, behaviour that was mirrored by Janet, and said, ‘That’ll be them,’ so that for a moment I thought perhaps she meant her imaginary assassins until reality took a grip and I realized it was Archie and Philippa, home from the Dean’s.
Duke lumbered to the door to greet them, while Maisie fled and threw herself under her bedcovers, feigning a child who had been asleep for hours, watched no television, eaten no sweets and done all her homework. The rest of us conducted a charade of sober purposefulness – I took out a pen and furrowed my brow while Mrs McCue managed to add a stitch or two to her mysterious weaving and Mrs Macbeth produced a yellow duster from about her person and rubbed hard at a lamp on the small table next to her chair.
Philippa went straight upstairs while Archie, glassy-eyed with drink, fought to get himself through the door-frame of the living-room.
‘Good to see you’re finally getting down to some work at last,’ he said to me. He frowned at his mother. ‘Still here?’ he said. ‘You’ve missed the last bus, you know.’
‘Aw, son,’ Mrs McCue said affectionately.
Philippa clacked downstairs in her clogs. ‘Sleeping like a baby,’ she announced.
‘Who is?’ Archie asked, looking vaguely alarmed as if Philippa might have given birth to yet another McCue while she was upstairs.
‘Ferdinand,’ Philippa said, in the tone of voice she reserved for people incapable of doing compound-propositional logic. ‘How was the old Ma?’ she asked me, as though Mrs McCue wasn’t in the room. ‘And her friend,’ she added, giving Mrs Macbeth a doubtful look. Mrs Macbeth spat on the duster and rubbed hard at the lamp as if she was conjuring up a genie.
‘Must be going,’ I said hastily. Much as I would have liked to learn more about the handsome jailbird sleeping upstairs I felt I’d had enough for one day somehow.
‘Come and see us,’ Mrs McCue said. Mrs Macbeth nodded vigorously in agreement with this invitation. ‘In our jile,’ Mrs McCue added with relish.
‘The Anchorage is a very nice place,’ Philippa said to me. ‘It came highly recommended by Grant . . . or Watson . . . or whatever – the old Ma’s friend over there is his mother-in-law.’
‘Dozy wee bugger that he is,’ Mrs Macbeth agreed cheerfully.
Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth seemed far too sprightly to be in an old people’s home but as if she read my thoughts (a terrifying idea) Philippa said, ‘They’re not as capable as they look, you know. They’re always having accidents. The old Ma’s forever falling and breaking bits. We thought we’d get her in before she started to deteriorate.’
‘Thanks,’ Mrs McCue said.
Mrs Macbeth and Mrs McCue waved to me from the doorway of the living-room. After a struggle, Mrs Macbeth had hoisted Janet up in her arm and was now waving her paw for her like a puppeteer. Archie accompanied me down the hallway, taking up most of the space, so that I had to squeeze past him to get to the front door. He usually chose the hallway as the locale for the obligatory pass he made at all female students who strayed within the walls of his domain. Tonight it was a half-hearted affair that I managed to side-step quite easily due to the night-long transfusion of red wine into Archie’s veins.
My sense of foreboding had grown so strong that I hurried past her without looking in her face, mumbling that I didn’t have a watch. I glanced anxiously behind me but the woman had disappeared. A sudden wink of light behind me made me think of The Boy With No Name until I realized it was a car, headlights extinguished, cruising very slowly along at a distance behind me. I quickened my pace and by the time I reached the top of Paton’s Lane I was running. The car didn’t turn to follow me and I paused for a moment in the doorway and watched it glide past the top of the street. It gave the distinct impression, I noticed, of being Cortina-shaped.
Heart thudding uncomfortably in my chest, I ran up the unlit stone stairs of the tenement. The darkness at each corner of the stair seemed to have a thicker quality, as if the shadow of a ghost was skulking there. There was a smell of fried food and something sweet and cloying. This was probably what it was like to be trapped in The Expanding Prism of J. Or a horror film. It was with an overwhelming sense of relief that I turned my key in the lock and achieved the safety of the inside.
I lay out the old chipped Spode cups and saucers. We drink our tea black for we have no milk cow, nor a good red hen, not even a single honey-bee.
We sit and drink our tea at a kitchen table where resentful servants must once have sat. Living here is like living in a folk-museum, actors in A working kitchen, circa 1890, except there is no-one to observe us. Or so we hope.
~ Is any of this going anywhere? Nora asks, staring into her teacup like a fortune teller.
‘Well, it’s leading here, eventually. As you know.’
~ It’s a rather roundabout route.
‘There aren’t any maps. You see if you can do better then, tell me about Douglas.’
~ Who?
‘Your brother.’
Evangeline soon fell pregnant and bravely gave birth every two years from then on until the end of the first decade of her marriage to Donald. Altogether they had five children, three boys (Douglas, Torquil and Murdo) followed by two girls. The first of these, Honoria, was dropped on her head from an upstairs window in the house in Eaton Square by a nursemaid who was later certified insane. Honoria was not exactly dead but neither was she exactly alive and after several months of dedicated nursing by her mother, Honoria finally gave up the struggle and died.
The second girl, Elspeth, followed her shortly afterwards, succumbing to an epidemic of diphtheria when she was one year old.
‘As if,’ Evangeline said, ‘little Honoria just couldn’t bear to play alone up there.’ This was a little sentimental for Donald’s taste. Donald was not, in truth, a very nice man. Bluff and blunt, he disassociated himself from emotion, believing it to be the territory of women, children and weak-brained idiots.
Evangeline, never particularly stable, became morbid. She was convinced that her remaining children were going to be plucked from her arms, one by one (she was right, of course), and eventually Donald gave in to her insistent wish that the remnant of her family be brought up back in Scotland away from metropolitan dangers.
The house – ‘Woodhaven’ at Kirkton of Craigie in the glen – was not the most hospitable of homes. Built from local stone and decorated with Alpine gables, it was little more than a glorified Victorian hunting lodge, erected by Donald’s father, Roderick. It was a cold place and a succession of housekeepers and servants had failed to warm it up. Donald, however, was quite content with this move as he could spend all his time now shooting and fishing and generally destroying everything that ran or flew on his rainy estate.
Evangeline concentrated on keeping her sons alive, feeding them on oatmeal and potatoes and boiled chickens and keeping them well away from disease, immorality and nursemaids. She had to be particularly vigilant when it came to the large amounts of water threatening them at every turn. The river Kittrie flowed not a hundred yards from the house and had been partially diverted on the instruction of Roderick to feed a small, artificial loch he had created. This had been stocked with a great many young trout and, accidentally, a rogue baby pike which fed at leisure on its companions and grew to be legendary. Roderick devoted the rest of his life to trying to catch it.
The boys were all taught to swim in case of accident as well as being made to undertake regular walks and suffering annual bracing holidays at the island holiday home—
‘You mean here?’
~ Yes, don’t interrupt – and were forced to sleep for ten hours every night with their bedroom windows wide open, even in winter, so that they were sometimes woken by snow falling on their faces. By the time they were in their teens they were all in astonishingly good health with strong teeth, straight bones, good manners and clean habits and were, as everyone remarked, a great credit to their mother and their country.
When they went off to school, to Glenalmond, Evangeline wrote each of them a letter every week begging them to eat well, refrain from unhealthy thoughts and be vigilant around water, sharp objects and occupants of the sick bay.
When war was declared and the Hun were begging for a good thrashing Douglas was amongst the first to volunteer to give it to them. Feudalism still being a concept that was understood properly in that part of Scotland at the time, his example was followed by a swathe of his father’s tenants from the glen. Torquil crossed to France three months later and Murdo decided he wasn’t going to be left out of their adventures. Although he had been brought up not to lie, he swore to a recruiting officer that he was eighteen years old – he was fifteen – and eager to fight the foe. The recruiting officer signed him up with a conspirator’s wink.
They died in reverse order to that in which they’d been born. Murdo fell at Mons, neatly decapitated by a shell and six months later Torquil was lost for ever, drowning in the mud of no man’s land. Donald and Evangeline were not told at first because Torquil’s commanding officer thought he might eventually turn up but after a few weeks it became clear that those calcium-rich bones of his were going to secretly fertilize foreign soil for years to come.
A year later, Douglas was accidentally shot by his own side. He lived for several minutes after the bullet entered his brain and the snow that started falling on his face made him think that he was lying in his bed at home with the snow blowing off the hills through the window and that his brothers were safely asleep in their adjacent bedrooms (which in some ways they were), dreaming of their lives to come. Little Honoria had clearly been determined on her full complement of playmates.
Evangeline and Donald called their lost sons ‘the boys’, as if they were a single entity, rather than the individuals they had never really had the time to become. Donald comforted himself by imagining himself an unwilling Abraham, called upon to sacrifice his sons on the altar of patriotism. For a long time, Evangeline hung onto a secret hope that instead of drowning in mud, Torquil had deserted (she’d never been much of a patriot) and one day soon was going to walk up the long rhododendron-lined driveway, as jaunty as when he was alive. Time dulled this possibility and when the armistice was announced and there was still no sign of him, Evangeline decided that it was unlikely he would be coming home now and went down to the laundry room and hanged herself with a length of washing-rope from a large hook in the wall the purpose of which had always puzzled the laundrymaids but which now seemed only too clear. The end.
‘Sorry?’
~ The end.
‘Well, that was cheerful.’
~ Don’t hold me responsible, Nora says with a careless shrug, blame the story, not the storyteller. Do you want more tea?