‘Ferdinand,’ I murmured and rested my head gratefully on his shoulder before finally fading right away.
I woke up slowly to the steady sound of rain. Something as cool and smooth as soapstone was spooning my naked body. I rolled over and saw —
Dr Dick.
I propped myself up on one elbow and looked at him in horror. His eyes opened slowly and I was able to observe his brain catching up with them.
‘Effie,’ he said, yawning and fondling the pale stalk of his penis in a boyish, asexual way. Had we been having an extra-curricular tutorial of some kind? And would it result in better marks for me? Or worse?
‘What have we been doing exactly, Dr Dick?’ I asked tentatively.
He groped on the bedside table for his little spectacles and put them on and said, ‘I think we’re on first-name terms now, don’t you? Call me Richard, why don’t you?’
I tried to comfort myself with the thought that worse things could happen to me but just then I really couldn’t think of any.
A wretched cold fog was coming in from the sea and crawling over the city. The melancholy sound of the foghorn boomed at regular intervals and set up a strange melancholic echo in my bones.
— Can you have fog and rain at the same time?
‘If I want.’
‘Tea?’ Dr Dick offered, gesturing vaguely in the direction of his kitchen. ‘There’s no electricity,’ he added, in case I was thinking of saying yes. Dr Dick was helpless without the Monopoly board utilities. I glanced at the clock.
‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I really have to go, I have to hand in an essay.’
But first I had to see Bob. Because the last time I caught sight of him was in the massage room in Forres in the oily hands of the Finnegans Wake girl and I wondered if he could give me an adequate explanation of his behaviour. I doubted it somehow. Was he going to leave me before I could leave him?
Nora is walking on the strand — a place that is neither sea nor land and which she says is one of the doorways to the other world. She is careless of the surf washing around her wellingtons. Occasionally she picks up a pebble or a shell and stuffs it into one of the pockets of the large man’s overcoat she is wearing. I suspect she is still wearing the diamonds under her woollen scarf. She keeps looking out to sea with the eagerness of a mariner looking for landfall. She smells the wind.
— It’s coming, she says.
‘What is?’
— The end.
She walks off, her pockets bulging with stones. I run after her, battling the wind.
‘So . . . elaborate on the marriage, divorce, death bit.’
Nora sighs and recommences her tale with almost theatrical reluctance:
— Effie was packed off to London to some distant Stuart-Murray relation, to be ‘finished’ in some way. It was a shame she wasn’t just finished off. Lachlan went to study law in Edinburgh and when the war started he joined the army and Effie came home to Glenkittrie, where she hung around all day saying she was ‘bored out of her skull’ and there was nothing worse than Effie when she was bored. I used to look forward to going to school every morning — I attended the local primary — just to get away from her. I was ‘the brat’, ‘the kid’. She was supposed to look after me because Marjorie was ill but she never did. There were no nannies or anything by then — the London house had been sold long ago, the Edinburgh house rented out to a property company, there was always a large, but invisible, drain on the Stuart-Murray finances.
— Kirkton of Craigie was a tiny school; most children came from the farms round about. I spent a lot of time with them outside of school as well —
Nora pauses and looks pensive. I suppose it’s disturbing for her to go back to a time when she had a normal life, when she had friends, when her future was still full of possibilities.
— I used to think I must be a wicked child because I felt no love for either Donald or Marjorie. I worried that it meant I would grow up like Effie — incapable of caring about anyone but myself. But it wasn’t my fault if Donald was a foul-tempered bore, Marjorie a drunkard. They barely spoke to me, even less to each other. They were like people who had lost their souls.
(What a metaphysical turn of mind my mother (not) has.)
— Then the army started up a camp nearby and Effie wasn’t bored any more. I remember a time when she came home while we were eating breakfast. Her make-up was smudged, her hair was a mess and she smelt of drink and cigarettes and something more rank and vulgar. She used to think that she was so beautiful but sometimes she was the ugliest creature imaginable.
Donald started shouting at her, calling her a disgraceful whore, a little bitch in heat and so on. Did she want another little bastard? he yelled at her.
And Effie replied, ‘Not if it turns out as dull as the first one.’
‘Is that a clue?’
Nora ignores me.
— Anyway, eventually she fell pregnant — there was a whole regiment that could have fathered the child but she managed to net an officer and got married.
Then the war ended—
‘How fast time goes in this tale, and you’re leaving out all the details.’
— There’s not enough time for details. Effie’s husband — I think he was called Derek, but I can’t be sure, he made very little impression on anyone, least of all Effie — was demobbed — I think he was a chartered surveyor. Derek, as we’ll call him, even if that isn’t his name, started talking about buying a nice house in a garden city down south and starting a family. I don’t think it had ever occurred to Effie that he might have a life beyond the war. She left him as soon as she saw him in his demob suit.
Marjorie was dying by then. Donald had had his first stroke. I’d been sent away to school — to St Leonard’s — where all the teachers were suspicious of me because I was ‘Euphemia’s sister’ and I had to work very hard to reassure them I wasn’t like her.
Lachlan was working in a law firm in Edinburgh. He had a squalid little basement flat in Cumberland Street, in the street next to the family’s old New Town house, now home to an insurance office — that’s a detail since you’re so keen —
Effie used to go and stay with him there for days on end after her divorce. They made quite a seedy couple. I have no idea what she did all day when he was at work.
I had to go and stay there once, just before Marjorie died. I must have been thirteen or so. I slept on the couch and Effie said, ‘Oh, no, no room for me, I’ll have to sleep with you, Lachlan,’ and laughed. They both seemed to think this was hilarious. It never seemed to occur to them that Lachlan could sleep on the couch and Effie and I could share a bed.
It was a weekend and they stayed in with the curtains closed and drank and smoked the whole time. I’d hoped that they might at least have taken me to the Castle. In the end I went out on my own, roamed around Edinburgh for hours and ended up getting lost. A policeman had to show me the way home. It was a shame he didn’t come in with me. I might have been taken away by a welfare officer and had a normal life. The flat was a wreck — bottles and ash-trays, dirty plates, even underwear. Lachlan had passed out on the couch and Effie could barely speak she was so drunk.
When I came home I found that Marjorie had died in the local cottage hospital and without a single living soul to see her off, the nurse by her bedside having slipped outside for a cigarette.