Frank finally managed to yank open the shutters of his stall just as the little aircraft plunged into the sea with a kind of plopping noise. A few minutes later a woman struggled out of the water and waded ashore. Not often you saw that, Madame Astarti thought.
Frank was indifferent to the woman walking out of the water, instead he was screaming at what he had found inside his stall. Where his plaice and haddock and tubs of whelks were usually displayed was an altogether more sinister cold water fish – the body of a dead woman lay on the slab, with a lemon stuck in her mouth and a few sprigs of parsley for garnish.
Mabel was very religious; she claimed she’d had visions as a child, something which hadn’t gone down very well with the strict and obscure Christian sect that her parents were members of, who branded her a fanciful and heretical child, one teetering dangerously on the brink of papism and idolatry. Now Mabel no longer bothered with the edifices and ritual of the Church but claimed, like Joan of Arc before her, that God spoke to her in person all the time, although sometimes he sent his Son to have a word and very occasionally she was blessed with a tête-à-tête with the Holy Ghost Himself. Like Joan of Arc, she was also engaged in a one-woman battle with the enemy, but in the case of Mabel it was the forces of Satan rather than the English (which is not the same thing, despite what some may say).
Mabel was herself English, born in Bristol to a family that, despite its earthbound name, had been seafaring for centuries, manning men-o’-wars, submersing in submarines and ferrying cargoes of slaves across the great wide ocean. The last male in the Orchard line – Mabel’s brother – had been torpedoed on the China Seas and there was a general sense of disappointment in the family that the nautical genes were going to die out with Mabel, who had decided to remain as chaste as a nun.
Although she had spent her whole childhood wishing for children of her own, Mabel had forsaken personal happiness and all thought of marriage and married love after her fiancé – Dudley – was shot through the heart at Tobruk, this in spite of the little Bible Mabel had given him as a parting gift and which had nestled snugly in the pocket of his uniform waiting to catch bullets and save his life – in the manner of a story she had read in a magazine. After it fatally failed to fulfil this function, Mabel was uncertain as to whether she should stop believing in God or in fiction. She chose the latter and never opened a magazine – or even a newspaper – from that day forward. After Dudley died Mabel trained as a nurse. If he had lived she had planned to fill her arms with so many babies that when they grew up there would be enough Orchards to crew the entire British naval fleet if necessary.
Mabel wore a plain gold crucifix around her neck, given to her by Dudley on his last leave, and the chain was so thin that it was beginning to disappear into the folds and rolls of flesh around her chin. For Mabel was fat. There was no politer word for it. Her personal God put no restrictions on appetite or intake, indeed, Mabel had a feeling that he actively encouraged her to eat. And her body, she reasoned, was made by Him, so what better way to praise His works than to develop more of it. It was God, after all, who had put all this bounty on earth – even lardy cakes and black bun – who was she to shun it? Lachlan, when he first met her, called her ‘the cow’ and she did possess a strange passing resemblance to a Jersey in the colour of her hair, the length of her lashes, the flesh on her ample fallow flank. Yet she was stately, almost majestic, in her bulk – more like a great tribal queen than a milch-cow and when she ate – which was often – she was as delicate as a cat.
‘Well-upholstered,’ mumbled Donald – who still had the power of speech, if little else, and had taken an uncharacteristic ‘shine’ to his new caretaker. Mabel was so relentlessly nice to him with her ‘God bless you’s and ‘Jesus loves you’s that he began to believe this propaganda and the idea that God might still love him, despite his flaws, wrought a strange change in his character and made him almost bearable. And, although now in his seventies, Donald was still capable of appreciating a female bosom and took considerable, albeit heathen, pleasure in trying to catch sight of Mabel’s butterfat breasts through her cheap blouses, as she bent over him to attend to some intimate bodily function or other of his.
Unfortunately for Donald, he was now paralysed down his left side and could not really put his thoughts into action.
Listening out for God was the only time her hands were idle; the rest of the time they were the busiest hands He ever fashioned. Mabel was particularly fond of knitting; sometimes she unravelled things on purpose just so that she would have something to knit back up again.
When I first met her, in the school summer holidays when I was nearly sixteen, Mabel had already been ensconced in the house for three months. The atmosphere in Woodhaven was quite changed. Everything was clean and orderly and, possibly for the first time ever in that household, everything was peaceful – but then Effie wasn’t there and peace and Effie never lived in the same room together.
Mabel was so kind to me, always asking, Was I all right? Was I warm enough? Did I need anything knitted? Would I like something to eat? To drink? Did I want to walk? Talk? Listen to the radio? It made me realize what a cold childhood I had had, how mean-spirited my mother had been, how distant my father, and last, but not least, how peculiar and perverse my siblings.
‘And?’
~And I’m going to bed. Goodnight.
I had to fight my way into the English department. The Tower extension was under siege from protesters, a motley crew now as it seemed anyone with any kind of grievance had begun to attach themselves to the uprising to demand a new world order – students wanting free condoms or the tied-book loan period extending, antivivisectionists, diggers and levellers, even a sprinkling of Christians – I spotted Janice Rand and her balding friend holding a hand-made sign that said ‘Overthrow sin – let Jesus into your life’. I doubted that there would be enough room.
There was no sign of Maggie Mackenzie in her room and Joan seemed unsure of her whereabouts. This was very disappointing. I had gone to great lengths to hand in George Eliot on time and now Maggie Mackenzie wasn’t even there to receive her.
The door to Dr Dick’s room was closed, of course. I knew only too well why he wasn’t behind it. (Had I had sex with him? And wouldn’t I be able to tell if I had?)
Watson Grant’s door, on the other hand, was open to reveal a group of bored students to whom he was dictating like an old-fashioned dominie. He was sitting on the wide windowsill surrounded on all sides by books, and frowned when he saw me.
The door to Archie’s room was also open and I could hear his voice drifting out into the corridor –
‘Kierkegaardian dread . . . The identity of essence and phenomenon “demanded” by truth is put into effect . . .’
I tried to tiptoe past unnoticed but Archie caught sight of me and shouted, ‘What are you doing skulking about out there? Come and sit down!’ My protestations went unheeded and he almost dragged me into his room and pushed me into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs.
‘What Heidegger might call “an empty squabble over words” . . .’
I could see why he needed me, the only other person present was Kevin – looking distressed, like an animal tracked and hunted down by Archie’s relentless verbosity. No Shug, no Andrea, no Olivia, no Terri (well on her way now, presumably, to Fresno or Sorrento).
‘The use of the fragmentary and contingent to express the dissonant . . . as Pierre Machery says . . . the line of the text can be traversed in more than one direction . . .’
Was it really a week since I had last endured this? Archie bored on:
‘. . . the line of its discourse is multiple . . . the beginning and the end are inextricably mingled . . .’
I felt hot and cold at the same time, there were bees (or maybe Bs) in my head and my brain seemed to be in spasm. Was it my imagination or had the fog outside started to creep inside the room?
I began to shiver. I stood up and the room tilted. The fog was everywhere, I pushed my way through it.
‘Wait!’ Archie shouted after me, but I really couldn’t. I ran past Watson Grant’s room and saw him struggling to open his window. To let the fog out, I supposed.
I hurried on and, as the lift was out of order, thanks to the Culture and Anarchy boy, I barged past Joan and stumbled down the stairs.
As I ran outside into the chilly air I nearly collided with Maggie Mackenzie – in the middle of berating a rather cowed-looking Professor Cousins over some perceived administrative oversight.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ I said weakly to her. ‘I’ve got the essay for you.’
‘What essay?’ she said, looking at me as if I had grown even more stupid than usual. I raked through my bag for the essay, finally retrieving the tattered pages of my George Eliot.
‘What is this?’ Maggie Mackenzie asked, holding up the proffered essay between the tips of two fingers as if it was contaminated. I regarded it with horror – the pages were torn and ragged, the front cover almost shredded. There were filthy marks all over the paper as well as stains and blotches, as though someone had cried all over it. I peered at it more closely – the filthy marks seemed to be paw prints and the stains produced by dog slobber.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled to Maggie Mackenzie. ‘I think a dog ate my essay.’
An alarm bell sounded shrilly. At first I thought it was in my head, so odd was I feeling, but then people began to stream out of the building.
‘Oh, my lord,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘I do believe the place is on fire.’ I could see the fog escaping from the windows of the extension and suddenly realized that it wasn’t fog at all – it was thick smoke that was pouring out of the building.
Above our heads the sound of muffled shouting and banging grew more insistent. I looked up and saw Grant Watson hammering on the window of his room, pushing and pulling at the handle as if he was trapped inside. Then the window flew open suddenly and in doing so it sent flying all the books that had been piled up on the sill. Watson Grant shouted a warning but it was too late – the books rained down slowly like books in a dream and I looked on with paralysed interest as first one volume of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (A to Markworthy) and then the second (Marl to Z) fell like slabs of Old Testament stone onto Maggie Mackenzie’s head. A strange Splat! sound that could have belonged in a cartoon speech bubble was made by her body as it hit the ground.
When we got to the DRI we had to wait while she was seen and Professor Cousins suggested we go and visit Christopher Pike, former front-runner for head of department, ‘and perhaps Dr Dick’s still here?’ he mused to himself. I assured him that he wasn’t.
After some detective work, we eventually located Christopher Pike in a two-bed side bay of the men’s surgical ward. He was still trapped in his web of ropes and pulleys although now only recognizable by a name pinned up above his bed. The rest of him was swaddled in bandages from head to foot, like the Invisible Man, so that it could have been anyone pupating inside the crêpe-bandage chrysalis. Tubes came in and out of the bandages, all of them carrying liquids of a yellowish hue.
‘Poor old Pike,’ Professor Cousins said quietly to me. ‘I’m afraid he had another accident while he was in here.’
On Christopher Pike’s bedside locker there was a glass of sticky-looking orange squash and a bunch of yellow Muscat grapes, proving that somewhere else in the world there must be heat and light.
‘I don’t know,’ Professor Cousins said, making a great performance of chewing on a grape. ‘I may as well transfer the English department to the DRI.’ Christopher Pike gurgled something incomprehensible from inside his mummy suit.
‘You’ll soon be back on your feet, dear chap!’ Professor Cousins shouted at him.
‘He’s not deaf,’ the patient in the neighbouring bed remarked, without taking his eyes off the Courier he was reading. Christopher Pike made some more incomprehensible noises and his neighbour put down his newspaper and inclined his head towards him like a rather poor ventriloquist to translate the gurgling but then frowned and shrugged and said, ‘Poor bastard.’
The ward sister swept in ahead of a consultant who in turn was followed by a group of medical students like a gaggle of goslings. I recognized a couple of them from the Union bar.
‘Out,’ the sister said peremptorily to us.
‘I was concussed once,’ Professor Cousins said, but before he could embark on this familiar tale, a bell rang to signal the end of visiting-time – although for a moment Professor Cousins was under the impression that the hospital was on fire.
‘Well, goodbye,’ I said awkwardly to Maggie Mackenzie and, uncertain what was appropriate in the circumstances, I patted one of her washerwoman’s hands that lay atop the coverlet. Her skin felt like an amphibian’s.
‘The forces of darkness,’ he said conspiratorially.
‘The . . .?’
‘Forces of darkness,’ he repeated. ‘They’re all around us and they’re trying to destroy us. We should get out of here,’ he added, ‘before they spot us.’
‘Ah, yes, but that doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get them.’
~ You’ll never make a crime writer.
‘This isn’t a crime story. This is a comic novel.’
A distraught Kevin appeared as if out of nowhere, along with all three of Olivia’s flatmates. ‘An overdose,’ one of them whispered to me.
‘I found her,’ Kevin said when he saw me. He was sweating uncomfortably and a wheeze like that of Mrs Macbeth’s old dog was coming from his chest. ‘I came to ask her if I could borrow her George Eliot essay,’ he said.
‘She did Charlotte Brontë,’ I said flatly.
‘She had an abortion yesterday,’ one of her flatmates said to me as we watched Olivia being loaded into the back of the ambulance. ‘It’s a shame, she loved babies.’
‘Loved?’ It was only then that I realized that Olivia wasn’t unconscious – Olivia was dead.
‘People are already dead.’
~ Who?
‘Miss Anderson, poor Senga.’ (Not to mention most of Nora’s family, but I suppose it’s tactless to mention that.)
~ They don’t count, we didn’t know them. Don’t kill Olivia. I shall stop listening to you, I shall leave, I shall . . .
She searches for the biggest threat she can think of. And finds it –
~ I shall erase.
‘Oh, all right, calm down.’
After an agony of waiting the heavy door swung open and I dashed – as well as one can dash when hampered by a raging fever and a recalcitrant girl – up the stairs to her flat. One of Olivia’s flatmates was in the process of letting Kevin in. He was stammering on about George Eliot as I barged into him, sending him flying into the flat.
‘Olivia!’ I gasped to one of her flatmates.
‘She’s in her room, what’s the—’
Olivia’s door was locked. I told Kevin this was a matter of life and death, Olivia’s to be more precise, and he responded as heroically as Thar-Vint might have done by throwing his soft body repeatedly against the solid door until it gave in to his chivalrous bulk and opened with a splitting of wood.
Olivia was lying on her bed. An empty bottle of tablets and the remains of a glass of whisky were tumbled on the carpet. Her eyes were half open and she whispered to me, ‘Is Proteus OK?’ – which proved, if proof were necessary, what a charitable and altruistic person Olivia was. He was in good hands, I reported, and quite well – a sentence which contained one truth and one lie, which is a good balance in my opinion.
I pushed Miranda forward and said sternly, ‘Right – do something.’
‘Like ring for an ambulance?’ she said vaguely.
‘I’ve done that,’ Kevin said, dropping to his knees by Olivia’s bedside. Olivia’s lovely lip started to tremble and she began to weep – because beautiful girls weep where ordinary ones merely cry and grow blotchy (although Terri had a tendency to howl) – and I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and then burst into tears myself (because that was more the kind of girl I was).
‘For God’s sake,’ Miranda said crankily, ‘get some black coffee and start walking her round the room.’
‘Please do,’ I said faintly. My throat was swollen and my skin felt as hot and dry as desert sand, even though I had cold gooseflesh. I walked off quickly although I was having terrible difficulty co-ordinating my arms and legs. My legs felt weightless, as if I was on the moon, and I was worried that they might just float away. Other parts of me – my hands and my head most noticeably – felt as if they were being subjected to tremendous G-forces. Perhaps I should have consulted Miranda after all and explained to her that I was in the grip of the fading, falling disease.
I walked through town, not going anywhere in particular as long as it wasn’t home. I walked down Seagate, thought about going to the cinema but didn’t. The sickly smell of whisky drifted from a bonded warehouse and made me feel sick to my stomach. I carried on, down Candle Lane to Marketgait, across Marketgait to the Victoria Dock, where the ancient frigate Unicorn had found her final berth. Further off, a huge Scandinavian freighter was unloading wood and the smell of pine was carried through the foggy air. The water in the dock was brown and filmy and did not smell good, but I threw in a silver coin and wished for happiness and stepped back from the edge because the pull of water is a powerful thing and I expect many people have accidentally drowned on account of it.
Someone was standing next to me, a shadow on my vision, and laid a claw of a hand on my arm. I recoiled from the touch. It was the water-baby. The bad girl. The woman who is not the sister of the woman who is not my mother. (Not surprisingly) I didn’t have a full understanding of these tangled family ties and I asked her, rather tentatively in case the answer was in the affirmative, ‘You’re not my mother, are you?’
She made a face as if the idea was distasteful, though I think it was probably caused by some kind of alcoholic palsy. Her bony hand was still gripping my arm. When she spoke it was a sibilant, ‘Listen.’
‘Eleanora,’ she said and sucked through her teeth as if she was smoking a joint, ‘or Nora, as she calls herself, is a murderer.’
‘Murderess,’ I corrected her weakly.
‘She killed my father, she poisoned her stepmother, she tried to drown me, and very nearly succeeded I might tell you. It was sheer chance I didn’t die.’
‘Killed her father?’ I echoed vaguely.
‘Not her father,’ Effie said, her harsh accent making her sound impatient, ‘my father, not her father. Her father was a wonderful man. The world never appreciated Lachlan for what he was.’
I was very confused. Perhaps the fever was making me delirious. ‘Lachlan was Nora’s father? I don’t understand, I thought Donald was her father?’
‘Are you OK?’ a voice asked in my ear. The voice sounded tiny, as if it belonged to a gnat or someone far away, but it had Effie’s accent. I tried to say something but my tongue was too big in my mouth. My ears were filling up with fog. I felt my legs going from under me and held out my hands to ward off the ground when I fell – but there was no ground to fall onto, only space and air and then, finally, foul-smelling freezing-cold dock water.
I was plunged down to the bottom as if liquid lead ran in my veins, as if I was the bob on the end of a fathom-line, sent to measure the watery Murk. There was a taste of oil and sewage, there was darkness and there was bemusement too, for it seemed I had forgotten how to swim, despite having been carefully taught by Nora when I was small in a variety of municipal swimming baths up and down the coast.
But suddenly, without any effort on my part, I was shooting up to the surface, choking and coughing and fighting desperately to get a breath. I could see the Unicorn’s wooden hull looming out of the fog and caught a glimpse of Effie’s impassive features as she stood on the dock, but before I could shout to her for help I found myself being pulled back down to the bottom. The water was colder and darker this time and I was surprised when I popped back up to the surface again like a stopper out of a bottle of elderflower champagne. I had barely got a breath when the waters closed over my head a third time – which we all know must be the last.
The water no longer felt so cold, nor, strangely, so dark, and I was able to look around me a little and see that it was teeming with fish. They were not the kind of fish one might have expected to find in the sludgy waters of the Dundee docks – there were blue carp and shining golden orfs and the king of the fish, the great silver salmon. And then the most unexpected thing yet occurred – a mermaid pushed her way through a curtain of weedy fronds and swam into view. She had a huge fishscaled tail and her long hair trailed behind her like ribbons of seaweed. She lifted me in her strong arms and held me to her woman’s breast as we swam up through the water, through a trail of silver bubbles, up, up and up until we were finally once more in our natural element, which is to say, air, and I caught a glimpse of the mermaid’s face and it was Effie. The water-baby.
I was landed on the dock by invisible hands, but was not weighed and measured as a record catch. Instead I felt my chest being pummelled by one of the dockers who had been unloading the timber freighter, so that the first breath I took was scented with the pine of northern forests. When I finally opened my eyes, it was to the friendly face of the yellow dog. It thumped its tail on the pavement in recognition and grinned at me. Then I passed out.
I’ve never thought of Nora as having a scientific kind of mind, never think of her having any left-brain at all.
~ Yes, really, she says. I remember that it did nothing but rain that summer. That was nothing unusual, of course, but it was so warm as well and often the air had a heavy, tropical feel to it as if we were in the middle of some great climatic change. It was the strangest weather – purple, stormladen skies, air humming with static. I saw hornets for the first time, droning through the air as if they could hardly lift their own weight. And we were plagued all summer by wasps, one bike after another turning up, under the eaves, in the attics, in the lilacs overhanging the lawn. Mabel bought cyanide to poison them but apparently she’d bought the wrong kind – powder instead of gas – and we didn’t get rid of the wasps until the first frost of winter.
Then Effie came to stay, trying to avoid the sordid details of the divorce courts and the relentless pursuit of a Daily Express reporter intent on a photograph to reveal the face of the notorious co-respondent to the public. Apparently, the divorce courts had been shown photographs of every part of her anatomy except her face.
Effie was continually loathsome the whole time, hanging about the house, listless and bored, muttering vile things about Mabel – her size, the common food she cooked, her dubious morals. Mabel smiled at Effie and told her God loved her.
‘No he fucking doesn’t,’ she spat back. Effie was convinced Mabel was nothing more than a gold-digger and was terrified that she was going to lose whatever inheritance was left (which was very little and mostly composed of Evangeline’s diamonds, which Mabel had never worn), and although she hated sick-rooms she spent a lot of time sitting by Donald’s bed trying to find out details of his will.
She considered her father to be completely ‘ga-ga’ and had consulted her solicitor – Effie spent half her time with solicitors now – about getting the marriage declared null and void. I kept out of her way, she never had a good word for me. ‘Every time I look at you,’ she said, ‘I see myself getting older.’
Effie spent a lot of time on the telephone to Lachlan, who was still living in Edinburgh, trying to persuade him to visit, which he did eventually, in August. He brought his neurasthenic wife, the judge’s barren daughter—
‘Oh, give her a name, for heaven’s sake.’
~ Sure?
‘Yes.’
~ Pamela.
‘Thank you.’
~ His neurasthenic wife, Pamela, city born and bred and highly averse to the country. Pamela took to her bed almost immediately, complaining of headaches and humidity. Mabel spent her time ferrying iced tea and aspirin and arrowroot biscuits up the stairs and reassuring Pamela that despite all signs to the contrary, God loved her very much. An ungrateful Pamela complained that Mabel smelt of bacon fat, which wasn’t true – she smelt of Yardley’s freesia talcum powder and jam, for it was jam-making season and Mabel spent hours at a time stirring the boiling fruit and sugar in Woodhaven’s old copper jeely-pans that she had burnished up again with lemon juice and elbow grease. Jam-making was a dangerous activity because of the plague of wasps, so that before she began her task Mabel had to seal up the kitchen windows and warn no-one to trespass over the threshold of the kitchen.
She must have been making the jam for herself, for no more than two pots a year were consumed in that house. Effie was too bitter to have a sweet tooth and Donald certainly didn’t eat any jam, he was now living off sops and milk soup. He had recently begun to suffer dreadful pains in his stomach. The local doctor, who was surprised Donald was still alive anyway – a fact that was probably due to Mabel’s careful nursing – guessed at ulcers and prescribed Milk of Magnesia.
Lachlan and Effie spent all their time together, usually out of the house, driving or walking in the hills, sometimes swimming in the loch, in the rain, always plotting how to get rid of Mabel. Mabel herself was serenely indifferent to them, humming happily to herself as she went about her lowly tasks. She seemed like a woman keeping a secret to herself, and I was surprised that Effie – who had so many secrets of her own – didn’t try to prise it out of her.
The whole week that Effie and Lachlan were visiting, the short summer nights were rent by Donald’s roars of pain, nights already disturbed by the beastly moans of the cattle, newly deprived of their little calves, and the bleating of the sheep torn from their lambs.
‘So much for pastoral innocence.’
~ There’s no such thing as innocence, unless it is in the beating heart of a tiny bird—
—but then Nora is dive-bombed by an angry seagull, which serves her right for being so fanciful.
‘Go on.’ (How tiring all this encouragement is.)
~ No.
‘Very bad flu,’ Mrs Macbeth added.
‘Is that all?’ I asked.
‘You want something worse?’ Mrs McCue puzzled. ‘You nearly drowned, you know,’ she added. ‘Ferdinand saved your life. He’s a good boy,’ she added defensively; ‘they should have given him bail.’
‘He’s back in jail?’
No, this mustn’t happen, we mustn’t start to rhyme. I tried again, ‘How did Ferdinand save my life?’
‘He’d just got a job working down at the docks,’ Mrs McCue explained proudly. ‘He did a lifesaving course while he was in jail, so he knew what to do.’
‘But who pulled me out of the water?’
‘Don’t know,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘Some woman.’
~ It was a secret that only I shared. Donald had another stroke – one that robbed him of the power of speech – so he had no way of expressing his astonishment when his wife became miraculously pregnant. Not that I think for a minute that she told him, for she had told no-one else. Donald’s sick-bed had never been a marriage-bed and Mabel remained a virgin, untouched by first Dudley and then Donald. Yet somehow an immaculate conception seemed more likely than Mabel succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. Not that for a moment I thought God – in whom I did not believe – had chosen Mabel as His vehicle for the second coming.
Nor, clearly, did Mabel, for God was now punishing her in the most malign way he could – He no longer spoke to her. Mabel could sit all afternoon in her ladder-back chair in the kitchen after any number of pleasant lunches of cold chops, pork pies and home-pressed tongue sandwiches and not a word would fall from His lips.
No-one noticed that Mabel was pregnant. A few extra pounds of baby seemed to make no difference to her size. She never spoke about the father of her child and I didn’t understand what she planned to do once the baby was born. You can hardly keep a baby hidden.
‘Although you can keep its origins hidden.’
~ Not for ever. Mabel told me about the baby when I was home for the Christmas holidays. She was looking after it well already – dosing herself with cod liver oil, avoiding bad thoughts and spiders and drinking gallons of milk. ‘I’ll turn into milk,’ she laughed, but sadly. And knitting like a demon, of course, the drawers were full of little white lacy garments.
Effie had been in London, trying to rescue some money from the divorce. Unfortunately, she returned after Hogmanay and discovered a set of tiny woollen mittens, the purpose of which even a fool could have guessed at. Effie was like a cat in a box, I thought she was going to rip the baby out of Mabel’s stomach right then and there, and Mabel didn’t make things any better by telling Effie that God loved her when it was clear to everyone that not even God could have loved Effie.
So. The night that Mabel’s baby was born I had been at a ceilidh in the village hall in Kirkton of Craigie. It was Easter and my final school exams were in a few weeks’ time, I hadn’t done anything but study for months. Effie was away for the weekend with some man, I expect.
I’d had such a fine evening at the ceilidh, hurling and birling and falling in love with a strapping farmer’s son. We’d known each other for years, we’d been at the primary school together, but that was the first time he’d ever noticed I was female. I was wearing one of Effie’s cast-offs – a green taffeta dress with a huge skirt – New Look, certainly a new look for me.
I got a lift home on the back of the farmer’s son’s tractor and walked the last few hundred yards home. I was still hot from the dancing and the falling in love and so on, and didn’t feel the cold at all. It was past one in the morning but there was a full moon – a fat, cheesy moon, more suited to a harvest than a cold spring night. The cattle in the fields were all due to calve and I could hear their restless shuffling and puffing, but other than that it was so quiet. I felt as though I was standing on the edge of something high and glorious, flexing my wings and getting ready to fly.
(A girl in love is a frightening sight.)
The house was quiet too, more than usual, for Donald had recently subsided into a ghastly kind of darkness where pain was the only thing that seemed to get through to his mind. His doctor, making a more sophisticated diagnosis this time, declared it to be cancer of the stomach and prescribed morphine. I think he was hoping that Mabel would quietly overdose her husband and hasten his inevitable end, but Mabel didn’t believe in taking life – unless it was to end up on the kitchen table and be eaten – and thought that God should be left to do His business in His own good time. For she still believed in God, even though He no longer believed in her.
There was a kettle still hot on the range when I came into the kitchen and I made tea with it and sat at the kitchen table to drink it and plan my future with the farmer’s son. Would he wait four years while I did my degree? What would our children look like? What would it be like to be kissed by him?
‘You hadn’t kissed him?’ (How hard it seems to be to get a kiss off the man of one’s dreams. Has Nora ever been kissed?)
~ No, she says regretfully – as you would if you were thirty-eight and had never been kissed, but then I am nearly twenty-one and have been kissed many times and all of them put together aren’t worth an imaginary kiss with Ferdinand.
~ Then, finally, I went upstairs. First I looked in on Donald – usually if you couldn’t hear him moaning with pain you could hear him snoring but tonight he was very quiet. It struck me that despite her objections Mabel might have put him out of his misery. The moon was shining through a high windowpane, illuminating Donald – as still as any corpse – in his bed. The covers didn’t rise and fall with a breath and his arms were crossed over his chest as if he had gone to sleep expecting never to wake. I called out, ‘Father,’ and pinched his hand; his flesh was still warm but he was gone. I picked up the bottle that contained his morphine tablets from the bedside table and could feel its emptiness without looking inside. I felt nothing for the passing of Donald, except perhaps relief.
I hurried to Mabel’s room and as I neared I heard a fretful mewling sound. I thought it was a cat – I’d never heard a newborn baby cry before. I knocked on her door and opened it.
(Our own cats – although we hardly own them – are wandering around our feet, crying like banshees, not babies.)
Mabel was propped up in bed, a bed on which the sheets were in mangled and bloody disorder. She looked so dreadful that for a moment I thought she must have had some terrible accident – she had black shadows under her eyes, her hair was plastered to her head with sweat and the terrible look on her face suggested she had stared into the maw of hell. She was holding a baby in her arms – a red, prune-skinned infant. The baby was dressed in a great assortment of the clothes that she had been knitting all winter – leggings and a little coat, bootees, mittens and a beribboned hat. It looked like a baby that was ready to go on a long journey.
Mabel held the baby out to me without a word. It was sleeping and bore no resemblance to anyone. The question of its paternity wasn’t answered by its looks. It half opened its eyes and I took it over to the window and showed it the moon and, not knowing what else to do in these strange circumstances, I began speaking the kind of nonsense to it that you speak to babies.
Then the quiet night was disturbed by the noise of an approaching car engine. I heard the car turn into the drive and recognized Effie’s brutal driving. I looked to Mabel to warn her of Effie’s imminent arrival and saw her stirring a white powder into a glass of milk on her bedside table. I thought it must be a Beecham’s Powder – although that seemed a strange antidote to childbirth – but then I smelled the faint almond-smell of it and recognized the little paper packet that had held the poison for the wasps last summer.
I cried out and put the baby down on a chair and rushed over to Mabel and grabbed the paper packet off her, but it was too late, she had already swallowed the cyanide-flavoured milk. She wore a surprised expression on her face as if she couldn’t believe what was happening and then—
Nora pauses, not for effect, for she is taking no delight in her storytelling.
~ Have you ever seen anyone dying from poison?
‘Obviously not.’
~ Well, I don’t want to describe it, thank you. I think we should leave a space and imagine it, if we have the stomach—
I was feeling for a pulse, thinking something might still be done to save her, when Effie came in. Naturally, she was stopped in her tracks at the sight of Mabel. Effie stank of alcohol and she had a bite-mark on her neck. She seemed quite deranged. Then she noticed the baby lying on the chair and pounced on it, saying it wasn’t going to end up with what was hers. I’ve never seen such hate on anyone’s face, not even Effie’s. I would have tried to wrest the baby off her but I knew she wouldn’t care if she hurt it. She was screaming, all kinds of filth and obscenities about Mabel and the baby, about money, about solicitors. I thought someone would hear and come and help me but there was no-one there to come.
Effie darted out of the room and ran downstairs with the baby. I chased after her, across the lawn, through the gate in the fence and down to the river. The river was swollen and icy with the snow that had melted on the hills, but Effie waded into it as far as she could go. For a moment I thought perhaps she was going to kill herself too – my head was still so full of Mabel – and it was only when she shouted to me, ‘What do they do with kittens on the farm, Eleanora?’ that I realized she meant to drown the baby. She was quite mad, of course.
I waded in after her. The water was unimaginably cold and the current much stronger than I’d thought. The stones on the riverbed were slippery so that I had difficulty keeping my footing. The green dress, heavy with water, was dragging me down. I tried to snatch the baby out of Effie’s arms, but as I lunged for it I slipped and fell towards her. I caught her off balance and we both fell into the water. I caught a glimpse of the baby being carried away by the river, like a basketless Moses.
Effie and I clung on to each other as we were swept downstream. We fetched up close to the river bank, entangled in the branches of a tree that had fallen in the water. And then suddenly, without even thinking about it, I clutched a handful of her long hair in my hand and pushed her head under the water. I wanted her to die. I wanted her dead. She fought her way back up, clawing at me like a cat from hell. I had the advantage, though, for she’d been drinking and I had been toughened by years on the playing fields of St Leonard’s, which is a better training than a marine gets. She could hardly speak from the cold but she managed to plead with me, stuttering out the words that I’d been waiting for her to say for a long time.
Silence.
‘The words, what words?’
~ ‘Don’t kill me,’ she begged, ‘I’m your mother.’ And then I pushed her head under the water and held it there. When I let her go, she didn’t come back up.
~ On the whole, Nora says thoughtfully, I think I prefer your story.
She gave birth in her own bed at home during the summer holidays and the easiest way to conceal the truth was to say the baby was Marjorie’s, although God knows by that time Marjorie wasn’t fit to look after an infant. Effie wasn’t even late returning to school, leaving Marjorie and a completely disreputable nanny to bring me up. They thought I would be defective, being in-bred. They always treated me as if I was, even when I proved not to be. Lachlan was given a thrashing the next time he was home from Glenalmond and told not to do it again. That’s the ruling classes for you.
(This is all a little melodramatic, is it not? Grand Guignol with a pinch of Greek tragedy.)
~ I warned you, I told you right at the beginning that it would be a tale so strange and tragic that you would think it wrought from a lurid and overactive imagination rather than a real life.
‘And what of the baby? Is it dead?’ I ask.
~ You are so slow, Nora laughs fondly.