I gave her a bear-sized hug. It’s only when I see Ellen after a break that I realise how much she means to me. She hugged me back and looked up at me. If it had been anyone but Ellen, I’d have said there was a tear in the corner of her eye.
‘Hi, Sis. I know we should have called, but it was a spur of the moment thing. Ellie, this is Prim Phillips, my girlfriend.’
You know right away how my sister feels about someone. If she has doubts, it shows in a narrowing of her eyes that she doesn’t even know is there. She looked at Primavera, wide-eyed, and grinned. I have to say that even after a day’s drive through France, Prim looked fantastic. The sun had given her skin an extra glow, and had picked out shiny highlights in her hair.
‘You poor lassie,’ said Ellen, ‘come on in.’
The house was fantastic. Not huge, but big enough for a young family. It had a stone floor and walls, which made it wonderfully cool, and beamed ceilings, yet the important parts were modem. The kitchen, to which we followed Ellen, was lined with hand-built cupboards, and fitted out with every available appliance. A Pyrex bowl sat on the work-surface, half full of strawberries. Around it there lay piles of green husks.
Ellen pointed at it, still outraged. ‘See that wee so-and-so. They were for tonight.’ She glowered at her older son. ‘So help me God!’ Jonathan, reckoning he was on safer ground with me around, chanced his arm by smiling.
‘It’s all right, Ellie,’ I said. ‘We’ve got some more in the car.’ I cuffed Jonathan, very lightly, around the ear. ‘None for you though, pal.’
‘Allan still at work?’ I asked, innocently, and was concerned to see a shadow cross her face.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Allan works every hour God sends. Allan volunteers for extra work. Last week he was away so early and home so late that he didn’t see his kids at all.’ She tried to sound casual, but she didn’t fool me. My sister was not a happy lady.
I didn’t want to get into the domestics, so I changed the subject. ‘How are you getting on with the language?’
‘Bloody awful,’ she said. ‘Stuff that, though. How’s Dad?’
‘He’s great. I might as well tell you straight off; he’s got a new interest in life. Auntie Mary.’
Ellen’s face lit up again. ‘That’s great. I’ve been hoping that would happen. And how about Jan? Is she still with the German?’ Ellen did not approve of Jan’s relationship.
‘Slovakian, Sis. She’s Slovakian. Aye, they’re still going strong.’
‘And you two. How long have you been …’
We were still talking in the kitchen when Allan came in a couple of hours later, just after nine, but by that time the kids were in bed, our kit was in the spare room, and a meal had been prepared. ‘Coq au Vin’ Ellen called it, muttering something about ‘shaggin’ in a Transit’, but it looked like chicken in red wine sauce to me.
I try to make excuses for my brother-in-law, especially to my Dad, but I always wind up admitting that he’s a selfish, boring get. Allan is not the sort of guy you’d invite out to the pub. He was surprised to see us, of course, but not the sort of surprise that gives way to a big smile, like Ellen’s did. He barely hid his irritation at our disruption of his routine.
We ate outside in their small courtyard. Ellie asked Prim about Africa, and to be polite, I asked Allan about his job. He gave me a lecture on the state of the oil industry; I told him that I always judged the state of the oil industry by the number of rigs tied up idle in the Firth of Forth. Finally, as soon as half-decent manners allowed, my brother-in-law offered the ‘early start’ excuse and went upstairs.
Later, as Prim and I undressed in the tiny guest room, we thought we heard the sound of my sister’s raised voice. ‘See if I ever get like him, sweetheart,’ I said. ‘Make sure you shoot me before you leave, will you.’
In which an unhappy sister lends us her car and plots her own escape
We decided that French Grand Prix should be postponed until another night.
Neither of us said anything, but we knew that it just wouldn’t have been right in that unhappy house, under that roof. Instead, we lay together in the big iron-framed bed which almost filled the room, Prim in her nightshirt, me in my boxers, making our plans for the last stage of our journey, and trying not to dwell on the danger which might be lying in wait for us.
Next morning, when I wandered downstairs at seven o’clock for a glass of water, Allan was gone.
Over breakfast, with Jonathan packed off to school and Colin sent into the courtyard with a bun and a football, Ellen tried to keep her brave face on it, and I tried to go along with it. But it was no use.
‘What is it, Ellie?’ I asked her. ‘D’you feel homesick, or what?’
She shook her head. ‘No, wee brither. I feel bored. I feel uncared for. I feel abandoned. Try to imagine what it’s like living here. The place is lovely, sure, but so what. It’s in the middle of nowhere, the natives are unfriendly. Bloody Hell, the place even has a wall round it. It’s a place to visit, not to live, and yet I’m stuck here full-time with nothing to do but eat pastries and go quietly out of my mind. Look at the size of me, Oz. I’m like a bloody bus.
‘How would you fancy this for a life? How would you, Prim?’ Prim rolled her big eyes, and shook her head, solemnly.
‘But Ellie,’ I said, ‘shouldn’t you have thought all this out before you bought the place?’
She glared at me. ‘I didn’t buy it, brother. Allan did. He took the job, the company came up with this and he said okay. You don’t think he consulted me about any of it, do you!’
I watched her as she savaged her third croissant. ‘You know what, Ellie?’ I said. ‘I reckon that’s mostly shite. You were brought up in Anstruther, for heaven’s sake. That’s hardly a bloody metropolis. Yet you could handle that, and, if everything else was okay, you could handle this.
‘But we both know that right now, if you were living in the middle of the Champ d’Elysee, you’d still be bored out of your tree, and we both know why.’
But she wasn’t ready for such fundamental truth. She shook her head and stood up, to fetch more coffee from the big range cooker. ‘Enough about me,’ she said, sitting back down at the table.
‘Are you going to tell me, finally, what it is that’s brought you two out here? And don’t say you just came on holiday. You’re a creature of habit, Oz. You take your holidays in July, like the rest of Scotland.’
Normally, Ellie’s the third person in the world, alongside my Dad and Jan, that I’d have trusted with our problem. But all of a sudden I wasn’t sure. She had problems of her own.
‘Are you working up to telling me something bad about Dad?’ she probed.
I shook my head. ‘No, not at all. It’s nothing like that. Look if I told you you’d think I’m mad.’
She looked me dead in the eye. ‘Oz, remember when we were kids? Who did you come to when you were in bother? And who sorted it out for you? As for being mad, what’s new?
‘So come on boy. Out with it.’
So, just as I had with Jan and my Dad, I told her. I left out not a scrap of detail, from the size of Willie Kane’s organ, to the size of his wife’s betrayal. When I had finished, my sister was smiling. ‘It’s just like when you were Jonathan’s age.
‘You know, Prim, this bugger never got into ordinary bother like other kids. He did it in the grand style. I remember one summer: the man next door grew garden peas, on stalks, and they were right up against the boundary fence. This yin here, he reached through the fence, and he stripped all the peas out of nearly all the pods, but left them hanging there. When the man’s wife went out to pick her peas, all she found was empty pods, hangin’ there looking pathetic, like blown green condoms. There was hell to pay. He’d maybe have got away with it too, only he kept the evidence in a basin in his room!’