‘She seems so very small,’ Andrea whispered to me, nodding in the direction of Mrs Macbeth’s retreating back. ‘Was she small to begin with? Or do we all end up like that?’
‘What?’ Mrs McCue said. ‘It’s rude to whisper, you know.’
‘I said,’ Andrea said more loudly, ‘that she seems very small.’
‘Who? Who seems very small?’ Philippa asked.
‘That . . . small woman,’ Andrea said helplessly, for Mrs Macbeth was now out of sight.
‘She means Mrs Macbeth,’ Mrs McCue said, buttering everything she could get her hands on.
‘Mrs Macbeth?’ Andrea repeated doubtfully.
‘It’s a perfectly good name,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘People are called it.’
‘Well, they’re not called “ it ”,’ Professor Cousins said and laughed.
‘Look,’ Heather said crossly, ‘this isn’t the WI; we’re supposed to be having a serious meeting about wages for housework.’
Mrs McCue took out a familiar piece of knitting and frowned. ‘Wages for housework? But who would pay them?’
‘The wages of sin,’ Professor Cousins said vaguely. ‘You don’t seem to have a hot-water jug,’ he added to Philippa.
‘What would I want a hot-water jug for?’ she puzzled.
‘For hot water, of course,’ Mrs McCue said. Before this conversation could carry on (‘What would I want hot water for?’ et cetera), Maisie burst into the kitchen, Lucy Lake trailing on her heels.
‘Hello, Emily,’ Sheila said carelessly, when she saw Lucy.
‘Lucy,’ Lucy corrected her. Sheila peered at her eldest more closely and still didn’t seem convinced.
‘Salmon sandwich?’ Philippa coaxed, pushing the plate towards Lucy and Maisie. No-one had so far touched one. Mrs Macbeth wandered back into the room and looked startled, as if she had been expecting to enter a quite different room in a quite different house (and perhaps at a quite different point in the century).
Professor Cousins cranked his skinny cat hams up from his chair and pulled another one out for Mrs Macbeth and said, ‘Do take a seat, Mrs Macbeth,’ so that Heather looked fit to explode at this further affront to her egalitarian sensibilities.
The sight of Maisie reminded me that the last time I saw her I had recklessly abandoned her to Chick’s dubious guardianship.
‘You got home all right then last night?’ I asked her.
She rolled her eyes (‘Oh, don’t,’ Professor Cousins said faintly). ‘It depends what you mean by “all right”,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of bannock.
‘She was late, I know that,’ Philippa said.
‘I had recorder practice,’ Maisie lied artlessly, but then a muffled squealing noise announced that Proteus had woken up. I hoped he hadn’t fallen off the bed.
I had moved Archie’s manuscript from beneath the guest bed before putting Proteus down. He was too young to be exposed to the corrupting influence of J and his cohorts. The latest chapter to be added was particularly nasty. J — or J’s doppelgänger, for he appeared to have acquired at least one recently — was being tortured by a particularly sadistic woman wearing nothing but high-heeled leather boots. More bizarrely still, The Expanding Prism of J had been joined in the spare room by The Wards of Love, like a matching pair of His ’n’ Hers imaginations. I dreaded to think what would happen if the two got mixed up. Before she knew where she was, Flick would be wearing Avengers boots and running up and down endless stairs in European apartment blocks being chased by the vile beasts of the imagination (Paranoia and Melancholia).
I changed Proteus’s nappy, bundling him anyhow into the awkward terry square but pinning it very cautiously in case I pierced his fragile baby flesh. I wondered what I was going to do when I came to the end of Olivia’s supply of nappies. Perhaps I’d have to start washing them. (What a thought.) I jiggled Proteus around on my hip for a while and showed him the view from the window. He held out one fat arm and tried to catch a seagull flying low. Today the Tay was the colour of infinity and made me feel suddenly depressed. Nothing good ever seemed to happen to me. And I was stuck with a madwoman with the same name as me stalking me, and someone else’s baby and Bob for a boyfriend and some horrible virus that had got into my blood and was taking over my body like the alien being that it was.
If only Ferdinand were here right at that very moment he could take me masterfully in his arms and I could wilt under the smouldering gaze of his soulful, troubled eyes. He could trace the outline of my face with his surprisingly gentle fingers — perhaps smile wolfishly — and bury his face in my hair and say in a smoky voice, ‘No woman until now, Effie, has—’ Proteus started to go purple in the face and I realized he was choking on something. I patted him on the back as hard as I dared but he still couldn’t breathe.
In desperation I held him upside down by his ankles and shook him. Thankfully, this extreme measure succeeded in dislodging a wad of paper like an owl pellet and Proteus gave a reassuringly hearty roar of distress. When he’d calmed down I unwound the pellet and discovered a particularly delirious page of Philippa’s dialogue. The Wards of Love really ought to carry a health warning.
When I took Proteus back downstairs I discovered that Professor Cousins was trying to get everyone to play ‘a word game’ which seemed to owe quite a lot to Martha Sewell. He caught sight of me and said, ‘Not The And — you know that game, don’t you, dear?’
The thought of Martha made me feel suddenly stricken with guilt about Terri. By Philippa’s kitchen clock it was now a quarter past one. Terri must surely be awake by now (although perhaps not) and wondering if Hank aka Buddy had gone AWOL.
‘You take three words,’ Professor Cousins was explaining, ‘and you try and make a sentence from them. For example fish,’ he bowed courteously at the ruins of the salmon, ‘table and, um, let me see, erythrophobia.’
‘Erythrophobia?’ Mrs Macbeth said tentatively.
‘Fear of blushing,’ Philippa declared.
‘I didn’t know that,’ Maisie said.
‘So . . .’ Sheila Lake said doubtfully, ‘the salmon on the table had erythrophobia. Is that right?’
‘Exactly!’ Professor Cousins said enthusiastically.
‘What a stupid game,’ Lucy Lake remarked.
‘Can we stop this?’ Heather sulked, but was ignored by everyone.
‘Another one,’ Mrs McCue demanded.
‘Well . . . cat,’ Professor Cousins said, catching sight of Goneril slinking into the kitchen, ‘beetroot and . . . kazoo.’
‘Well, that’s more of a challenge,’ Philippa admitted, but then Mrs Macbeth gave a little screech of alarm as Goneril jumped up on the table and deposited a limp McFluffy in front of her.
‘Jings, crivens and help me Boab,’ Mrs Macbeth exclaimed.
Some drama ensued — Maisie administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Mrs McCue producing a bottle of Macintosh’s smelling salts, and so on, but in the end the unfortunate creature was pronounced dead.
‘There’s no keeping them,’ Philippa sighed. ‘They’re as bad as lemmings.’
Maisie was sanguine about the sudden demise of the latest McFluffy and had already started explaining to Professor Cousins the complexities of hamster heaven, which was a branch of rodent heaven (rather full thanks mainly to the McCue household), itself a division of small mammal heaven, and so on.
‘And hamster heaven,’ Professor Cousins asked, absent-mindedly stroking the silken fur of the little corpse, ‘does that have further sub-divisions — Russian, Golden, Dwarf, and so on?’
‘Dwarf?’ Mrs Macbeth queried quietly but Professor Cousins had already embarked on another game. ‘You take a word of five letters,’ he beamed, ‘“novel”, for example, and then you must find something beginning with each letter — n-o-v-e-l — in each of the following categories — a town, a river, a flower, a writer and a composer. For example — Nottingham, the Nile, nasturtium, Nabokov and, um, let me see — a composer beginning with “N”?’