Lachlan, who had turned out in adulthood to be as vain, weak and selfish as his childhood character predicted, decided it was time he acquired a wife and got engaged to the highly strung daughter of a judge. Effie was furious, jealous as a cat, and immediately got married again herself to a man she met on a train. It was to spite Lachlan, I suppose. This new husband of Effie’s — let’s call him Edmund — was rich — he owned a business — war-profiteering of some kind, although Lachlan always referred to him as a car salesman because he’d offered to sell him his old Bentley ‘at a good price’.
Lachlan’s own wife, Gertrude, proved a disappointment. Chosen to be a brood mare for the Stuart-Murray blood, she turned out to be incapable of bearing children.
Donald had another stroke and became bedridden. Whenever I came home from school it was to the smell of the sick-room. The house was full of nurses coming and going, mainly going — Donald was a terrible patient, most of his nurses only stayed a few weeks; one only lasted a night after Donald threw a full urinal at her head.
Then Mabel Orchard came.
‘And?’
— And everything.
Brian twirled his cane and his false moustache for Madame Astarti’s benefit.
‘Can you get my fags from the dressing-room?’ Sandra asked her. They were waiting in the wings (a place Madame Astarti felt she’d spent her whole life), waiting for their cue to go on stage and start sawing and vanishing.
There was something melancholic about an empty dressing-room, Madame Astarti thought, even threatening in a funny way. It reminded her of Stage Fright or clowns. Madame Astarti had always found clowns frightening. They were so . . . unfunny.
There was no sign of a packet of cigarettes anywhere, but there were clothes hanging on a rail and a coat on a hanger on the back of a door and Madame Astarti went through the pockets of all of them, gingerly, because you never knew what you would find in a strange pocket, but she found nothing. She tried the cupboard. The door handle was stiff and she had to pull hard on it. She nearly fell over backwards when it suddenly responded—
Chez Bob
I COULD HEAR BOB TALKING IN THE BEDROOM AS I CAME INTO the flat. At first I thought it must be his usual sleep gibberish, but gradually it resolved itself into (a kind of) Logic —
‘Symbolize the following propositions in the symbolism of Predicate Logic:
a) The miners have a special case.
b) University teachers don’t have a special case.
c) The miners work harder than the university teachers.
d) The miners will get a bigger rise than the university teachers.
e) No group will get a bigger rise than the miners.
f) If one group works harder than another group, it will get a bigger rise.
g) A group will get a bigger rise than another group only if it has a special case and the other group doesn’t.
And that,’ Bob said in an exasperated voice, ‘isn’t even the difficult bit — right?’
‘Right,’ another voice said, sounding rather tired, as if it might have been listening to Bob for some time. Interestingly, the voice was female. I crept as silently as a dog-burglar across the carpet towards the bedroom door.
‘“ M ”,’ Bob continued ‘is “the miners”, “u” is “the university teachers”, “sx” is “x has a special case”, “hxy” is “x works harder than y”, “bxy” is “x will get a bigger rise than y”, Universe of Discourse is groups of workers. Show by constructing a formal derivation that (c), (f) and (g) together imply (b). You don’t know how to do this stuff by any chance, do you?’ he asked this anonymous female hopefully. ‘My girlfriend thinks I have no brain.’
‘And is she right?’
‘Ha, ha,’ Bob said. ‘You’re quite witty, aren’t you?’
The door to the bedroom was ajar and I gave it a nudge so that it opened just wide enough for me to catch a glimpse of Bob lazing naked amongst a tumble of empurpled sheets.
‘Brain and brain, what is brain?’ Bob said in a ridiculous voice. I nudged the door a little further until I could see the Finnegans Wake girl lying with the sheet pulled decorously up over her torso but nonetheless presumably naked also.
‘What are you talking about?’ she said in an exasperated tone.
I pushed the door wide open.
‘Arse,’ Bob said eloquently when he saw me. The Finnegans Wake girl screamed realistically.
‘It’s Star Trek,’ I said helpfully to her, ‘an episode called “Spock’s Brain”, from the third series.’ I shut the bedroom door. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
I was about to leave when the phone rang. I picked it up and listened in silence to the voice at the other end. Finally, I said, ‘Right, I’ll tell him then.’
When I opened the door to the bedroom Bob put his hands up as if he was expecting to be shot.
‘Bob,’ I said with a heavy heart, ‘Bob, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.’
‘The power’s off?’ he guessed. ‘We’re out of tea? You’re leaving me?’ he added rather dejectedly.
I sighed. ‘No, none of those things. Your father’s dead.’
Poor Bob Senior, a man I hardly knew really apart from the odd conversation over the tea-table about the state of the garden or the politics of state. Nonetheless, it was I who had the tears running down my face, while Bob stared helplessly at the Finnegans Wake girl, already pulling her clothes on and heading for the door.
What a particularly bad twenty-four hours it had been.
‘Buggery rats,’ Madame Astarti exclaimed as the body fell out of the cupboard on top of her.
Great Excitement
Madame Astarti had opened up early and was sitting in her booth, drinking tea and idly shuffling her Tarot pack whilst wondering whether to eat all of her Kit-Kat now or save two fingers for later, when she heard a strange ticking noise. She left the booth and went and scrutinized the war memorial suspiciously. The deactivated torpedo was definitely ticking like an alarm clock ready to go off. Madame Astarti looked around; no-one else seemed to have noticed it. Frank the fishman was unlocking his stall, fiddling with an awkward padlock.
At that moment Madame Astarti became aware of another noise, this one like the droning of a large, angry insect. ‘Look!’ she shouted to Frank, pointing in amazement to the blue sky where a small light aircraft was circling lower and lower, smoke trailing from one of its engines.
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 Orchard was thirty-four years old when she arrived in the glen to nurse Donald and was as passive as a piece of furniture and as placid as a bowling-green.
(How fanciful are my mother-not-my-mother’s figures of speech.)
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).