‘Too damn right!’
‘Well look after it. Don’t spend it, or anything daft like that.’
She gave me a woman’s smile which made it clear that there was no chance of that happening.
It was Thursday, and so, although it was evening, the city was bustling with shoppers. We walked arm-in-arm, up towards St Giles, turning on to the Mound and down the long flight of steps which led down to the National Gallery and to Princes Street beyond. The pavement outside the record shops and bookstores towards the West End was thick with people and so we turned up Castle Street and along Rose Street, until it opened out into Charlotte Square.
‘Drink first?’
She nodded. ‘I could slaughter a pint.’ ‘Oh Jesus,’ I thought, ‘this woman gets better and better!’
We walked along the square’s south side and down the few steps to Whigham’s. As usual it was thronged. I excused my way up to the high counter and ordered a pint of lager for the lady, bartender if you please, and the same of the day’s guest beer, Old Throgmorton’s Embalming Fluid or something similar, for me. We found elbow space at a shelf beside the bar. Prim closed her eyes and took a deep swallow. ‘Not the same as champagne, but not too damn bad either,’ she said. ‘Okay, Osbert. Out with it. Tell me about your life.’
I jammed my knuckles against my forehead. ‘Where shall I begin?
‘It’s pretty dull really. I’m twenty-nine years old, staring the big Three-Oh in the face. I was born in Cupar. My Dad’s a dentist and my Mum was a teacher, so I’m a real middle-class boy. When I was four, we moved to Anstruther, and my Dad lives there still. I meant it about my Mother being dead. That happened nine years ago. Dad was doing her teeth one Saturday morning, and he took an X-ray He found a shadow on her jawbone. From being perfectly well that day, she was gone in seven months.’ I tried to tell her that part of the story as casually as I could, but that’s a trick I’ve never mastered. I tried to hide it with a swallow of Old Throgmorton’s, but Prim saw through me. She touched my cheek, lightly. ‘Poor thing,’ she said.
‘Who? Me or my Mum?’
‘All of you. It must have been dreadful for your Dad.’
‘Yeah, it was. He was chewed up with guilt. He saw her through to the end, and then he started on a course of serious therapeutic drinking. He’d always liked a bevvy — as I said, he’s a dentist — but this was something he was doing as a punishment. Ellen was at home at the time, I was at university. Eventually she called me about it.
‘I went up to Anstruther for a weekend, and watched him at it. He did his regular Saturday morning surgery, as usual, then started into the Bacardi and Coke for lunch. After a while I
sat him down at the table and I said, ‘For fuck’s sake, Dad, this has got to stop. That Coke is murder on the teeth.’ He looked at me and he laughed. Then he began to cry. He cried all day, and all through Sunday. Monday was a holiday, so he and I played golf. Then we went to the cemetery and said hello to Mum. We both sensed the same thing, that she was pleased to see us. He was all right after that. We visit each other a lot now. He comes down here, I go up to Anstruther. He sees a bit of Jan’s mother. She teaches in the same school my Mum did. She’s divorced and they live near each other.
‘Ellen’s my sister, by the way. She’s three years older than me. She’s nice, our Ellen, but she’s married to a real chuckie. He’s in Marketing with an oil company. They moved out to France last year. He works in Lyon, and they live a bit outside it, quite close to the Swiss border. It’s funny, when we were kids I thought Ellen was a real tough cookie. No, scratch that, Ellen was a real tough cookie. Now she’s a housewife, with a teaching qualification and no job, waiting on her man and, as far as I can gather being ignored by him most of the time.’
I looked at her. ‘Bored?’
‘No, fascinated. Go on.’
I sloshed some more of the old T down my neck. ‘Where was I? Grew up in Anstruther, played for the school team, kept myself physically intact by being the fastest thing on two feet in the whole school. Buggery was a playground sport in our place, but none of the guys with low foreheads and trailing knuckles could catch me!
‘I left school at eighteen and came to Edinburgh to do an Arts degree. I’ve been here ever since. I came out with a two-two in Philosophy, Politics and Economics. I had dreams of getting a job as a researcher for the Labour Party, but I discovered that those jobs were filled by firsts or two-ones, and more often than not by Americans. I also discovered that my Mum’s death had left me feeling that politics isn’t worth a monkey’s anyway. So I joined the police.
‘I hated it from Day One, but after I’d been in a few months, I met a pal from university. He was working for an Investigation Agency, and he said that they’d a vacancy. So I hung up my truncheon and went to work for them.’
‘I thought you were self-employed?’
I tilted my head back and sent the last of the Old Throggies on the start of the long journey to the sea. ‘I am. The guys we worked for were a pair of real rat bastards. They were ex-RAF Military Policemen, and they’d taken their talents for persecution into the private sector. They came from the time when there were big bucks to be made from matrimonial work, and they were never happier than when they were photographing a misbehaving couple on the job, or pounding on hotel room doors, shouting “Come out, come out, the game’s a bogey!” I could see that these plonkers were living in the past, and I couldn’t see why they should be doing so on the strength of our honest toil.
‘So I hung in there for a year, until the clients got to know me. Then my pal Jimmy and I went round them all, offered them the same service for less money than Fagin and Bill Sykes were charging, and signed the lot up. We ran it as a partnership until three years ago, when Jimmy’s Dad retired and he went off to run his pub. Since then I’ve been on my own, although Jimmy still helps me out when I’m on holiday, or over-booked.
‘When I’m not working, I play golf with my Dad, go to the movies, listen to an eclectic collection of music, and pursue women.’
‘You mean they don’t pursue you?’
She finished her lager. ‘Two for the road?’ she asked, gladdening my heart still more. A woman who buys her round! I nodded, and she eased her way through to the bar, fishing a tenner from her purse as she went. I watched, anxiously, to make sure that not even one half of the fiver slipped out.
She was back in a couple of minutes, carrying a pint in each hand. ‘On the subject of women …’ she began. I guessed what was coming. ‘… what about Jan? If your Dad and her Mum are friends, how about you two?’
‘Jan’s great. We grew up together. Same class at school and all that. She’s someone’s dream woman, no doubt about it, but not mine. We tried the getting serious bit, went on holiday together a couple of times, but we agreed early on it wouldn’t work long-term. We know that we’re best off being pals. I haven’t had a real steady since Thingummy left a few years back. Jan, on the other hand, if she felt like it, could pull blokes as easy as picking her nose. She’s just got her own tastes, that’s all.’
She looked at me over the top of her glass, teasing. ‘And you haven’t?’
For once I was ready. ‘Oh contrayre, Madame. Fussiest of the fussy, that’s Oz Blackstone. Look at the company I keep.’
She smiled, and I wasn’t sure that under the blusher, she wasn’t blushing. I slipped my arms around her waist and drew her against me. We smiled at each other, saying nothing, but exchanging secrets and making promises for the not-too-distant future. Yet I could tell that underneath it all her sexual self-confidence was something of an act. Every so often she would break off eye contact, only to look up again into my face, with a half-grin that said, ‘Be kind to me, that’s all I ask.’