She made a face as if the idea was distasteful, though I think it was probably caused by some kind of alcoholic palsy. Her bony hand was still gripping my arm. When she spoke it was a sibilant, ‘Listen.’
— No, don’t, Nora says, looking uncomfortable. Don’t listen to anything she says. She was born a liar, she’ll die a liar.
‘I was always misunderstood,’ Effie said. ‘Just because I liked to have a good time. If it was nowadays I’d be called “liberated”. I didn’t do anything wrong.’
— Oh, but she did, she did, Nora says. She did nothing but wrong.
Effie lit a cigarette and stared into the fog.
‘Eleanora,’ she said and sucked through her teeth as if she was smoking a joint, ‘or Nora, as she calls herself, is a murderer.’
‘Murderess,’ I corrected her weakly.
‘She killed my father, she poisoned her stepmother, she tried to drown me, and very nearly succeeded I might tell you. It was sheer chance I didn’t die.’
‘Killed her father?’ I echoed vaguely.
‘Not her father,’ Effie said, her harsh accent making her sound impatient, ‘my father, not her father. Her father was a wonderful man. The world never appreciated Lachlan for what he was.’
I was very confused. Perhaps the fever was making me delirious. ‘Lachlan was Nora’s father? I don’t understand, I thought Donald was her father?’
— I’ve changed my mind, Nora interrupts, I think exposition is a bad thing in a story, some things should not be revealed.
Effie turned to look at me. Her dull eyes glittered for a moment and then clouded. Her voice continued but I could no longer really make out the words. Waves of nausea were washing over me and I couldn’t focus on anything; the Unicorn looked like a ghost ship appearing out of the mists of time. The fog was everywhere, inside my head and out.
‘Are you OK?’ a voice asked in my ear. The voice sounded tiny, as if it belonged to a gnat or someone far away, but it had Effie’s accent. I tried to say something but my tongue was too big in my mouth. My ears were filling up with fog. I felt my legs going from under me and held out my hands to ward off the ground when I fell — but there was no ground to fall onto, only space and air and then, finally, foul-smelling freezing-cold dock water.
I was plunged down to the bottom as if liquid lead ran in my veins, as if I was the bob on the end of a fathom-line, sent to measure the watery Murk. There was a taste of oil and sewage, there was darkness and there was bemusement too, for it seemed I had forgotten how to swim, despite having been carefully taught by Nora when I was small in a variety of municipal swimming baths up and down the coast.
But suddenly, without any effort on my part, I was shooting up to the surface, choking and coughing and fighting desperately to get a breath. I could see the Unicorn ’s wooden hull looming out of the fog and caught a glimpse of Effie’s impassive features as she stood on the dock, but before I could shout to her for help I found myself being pulled back down to the bottom. The water was colder and darker this time and I was surprised when I popped back up to the surface again like a stopper out of a bottle of elderflower champagne. I had barely got a breath when the waters closed over my head a third time — which we all know must be the last.
The water no longer felt so cold, nor, strangely, so dark, and I was able to look around me a little and see that it was teeming with fish. They were not the kind of fish one might have expected to find in the sludgy waters of the Dundee docks — there were blue carp and shining golden orfs and the king of the fish, the great silver salmon. And then the most unexpected thing yet occurred — a mermaid pushed her way through a curtain of weedy fronds and swam into view. She had a huge fishscaled tail and her long hair trailed behind her like ribbons of seaweed. She lifted me in her strong arms and held me to her woman’s breast as we swam up through the water, through a trail of silver bubbles, up, up and up until we were finally once more in our natural element, which is to say, air, and I caught a glimpse of the mermaid’s face and it was Effie. The water-baby.
I was landed on the dock by invisible hands, but was not weighed and measured as a record catch. Instead I felt my chest being pummelled by one of the dockers who had been unloading the timber freighter, so that the first breath I took was scented with the pine of northern forests. When I finally opened my eyes, it was to the friendly face of the yellow dog. It thumped its tail on the pavement in recognition and grinned at me. Then I passed out.
We are braving the great outdoors. We shall most likely be blown away. The grey seas are mountainous, the white horses wild and the clouds are whipped across the sky by an invisible hand.
‘Go on.’
— The summer holidays before my final year at school. I spent most of my time studying, I was hoping to go to Edinburgh University to read science.
‘Really?’
I’ve never thought of Nora as having a scientific kind of mind, never think of her having any left-brain at all.
— Yes, really, she says. I remember that it did nothing but rain that summer. That was nothing unusual, of course, but it was so warm as well and often the air had a heavy, tropical feel to it as if we were in the middle of some great climatic change. It was the strangest weather — purple, stormladen skies, air humming with static. I saw hornets for the first time, droning through the air as if they could hardly lift their own weight. And we were plagued all summer by wasps, one bike after another turning up, under the eaves, in the attics, in the lilacs overhanging the lawn. Mabel bought cyanide to poison them but apparently she’d bought the wrong kind — powder instead of gas — and we didn’t get rid of the wasps until the first frost of winter.
Then Effie came to stay, trying to avoid the sordid details of the divorce courts and the relentless pursuit of a Daily Express reporter intent on a photograph to reveal the face of the notorious co-respondent to the public. Apparently, the divorce courts had been shown photographs of every part of her anatomy except her face.
Effie was continually loathsome the whole time, hanging about the house, listless and bored, muttering vile things about Mabel — her size, the common food she cooked, her dubious morals. Mabel smiled at Effie and told her God loved her.
‘No he fucking doesn’t,’ she spat back. Effie was convinced Mabel was nothing more than a gold-digger and was terrified that she was going to lose whatever inheritance was left (which was very little and mostly composed of Evangeline’s diamonds, which Mabel had never worn), and although she hated sick-rooms she spent a lot of time sitting by Donald’s bed trying to find out details of his will.
She considered her father to be completely ‘ga-ga’ and had consulted her solicitor — Effie spent half her time with solicitors now — about getting the marriage declared null and void. I kept out of her way, she never had a good word for me. ‘Every time I look at you,’ she said, ‘I see myself getting older.’
Effie spent a lot of time on the telephone to Lachlan, who was still living in Edinburgh, trying to persuade him to visit, which he did eventually, in August. He brought his neurasthenic wife, the judge’s barren daughter—
‘Oh, give her a name, for heaven’s sake.’
— Sure?
‘Yes.’
— Pamela.
‘Thank you.’
— His neurasthenic wife, Pamela, city born and bred and highly averse to the country. Pamela took to her bed almost immediately, complaining of headaches and humidity. Mabel spent her time ferrying iced tea and aspirin and arrowroot biscuits up the stairs and reassuring Pamela that despite all signs to the contrary, God loved her very much. An ungrateful Pamela complained that Mabel smelt of bacon fat, which wasn’t true — she smelt of Yardley’s freesia talcum powder and jam, for it was jam-making season and Mabel spent hours at a time stirring the boiling fruit and sugar in Woodhaven’s old copper jeely-pans that she had burnished up again with lemon juice and elbow grease. Jam-making was a dangerous activity because of the plague of wasps, so that before she began her task Mabel had to seal up the kitchen windows and warn no-one to trespass over the threshold of the kitchen.