(This is all a little melodramatic, is it not? Grand Guignol with a pinch of Greek tragedy.)
— I warned you, I told you right at the beginning that it would be a tale so strange and tragic that you would think it wrought from a lurid and overactive imagination rather than a real life.
‘And what of the baby? Is it dead?’ I ask.
— You are so slow, Nora laughs fondly.
I am that red, prune-skinned infant. I am that baby in the water. My mother is not my mother, her mother is not her mother, her father is not her father, her sister is not her sister, her brother is not her brother. Lo, we are as jumbled as the most jumbled box of biscuits that ever graced a grocer’s shelf.
‘Buggery rats!’ Madame Astarti exclaimed as the torpedo on the prom exploded.
Blood and Bone
AGAINST ALL THE ODDS, DAYLIGHT HAS COME AGAIN AND WE HAVE survived the tempestuous night. We are lucky we haven’t woken up and found ourselves over the rainbow. Although there is no rainbow to be seen and the skies are ashen and Nora’s eyes are the colour of dead doves. The cats, offended at our lack of milk and fish and meat, have returned to their weather-beaten abodes.
We breakfast in the dining-room of the house, a room we are never usually in. The furniture — table, chairs, a huge dresser — is all dark and heavy in some mock-Elizabethan style that depresses the spirit. We might be in a hotel, the way the table is placed in the window to give us a sea view while we eat, although one would hope that a hotel would provide better fare than our meagre repast of oatmeal and milkless tea. When we finish we remain at the table. We seem to be waiting for something.
‘Are we waiting for something?’
Nora doesn’t answer. She is paying even more attention than usual to the sea. I hand her dead Douglas’s binoculars that have been sitting on the sideboard.
— Thank you.
There is a dot on the horizon — a little black speck of nothing on the edge of infinity. We wait. The dot grows bigger. And bigger. And eventually the dot declares itself to be the fishing-boat that first dropped me off here. It lurches up and down with the waves and it makes me feel sick just to look at it. The boat is ferrying a passenger to us, though his figure is indistinct and not yet known to us. My heart tips like the waves — perhaps Ferdinand has broken out of prison and come to find me.
— Unlikely, says my unromantic unmother.
We grab our outdoor clothes and scramble eagerly down the cliff-path to the shore to welcome our anonymous visitor. The fisherman waves to Nora and she waves back. This is probably as close as she gets to a social life. The fisherman helps his cargo — a rather shabby middle-aged man, bundled up in clothing that would do for a trip to the Arctic — into a little boat, as frail as a nutshell, and rows him as close to the shore as he can.
The man staggers through the waves and onto the clattering pebbles of the beach.
Nora puts out a hand in greeting and says,
— Hello, Mr Petrie. I’ve waited such a long time to meet you again.
And Chick — for it is indeed he — says, ‘Watch it, I’m away to boak again,’ and is true to his word.
We sit in the kitchen with a poor fire in the grate. The fishing-boat dropped off provisions and we are enjoying a feast worthy of Joppa, comprising tinned soup, oatcakes and cheese, Abernethy biscuits and a Lyons’ Battenberg.
— I’ve been telling her, Nora says to Chick.
‘Everything?’ he asks warily, lighting up a cigarette. He offers one to Nora, which she takes and then, squinting through the cigarette smoke at him, she says —
— Not everything. I’ve left room for your story.
There is much to be explained — why is Chick here? How do Chick and Nora know each other? How infuriatingly enigmatic this pair are.
— Constable Charles Petrie, Nora says. You had that nippit wife, Moira, wasn’t it? I bet she ended up leaving you.
Of course, now I remember — when Chick gave me a lift home on the road from Balniddrie to Dundee that night, he had mentioned working on the ‘Glenkittrie case’ when he was a village policeman in ‘heuchter-teuchter land’.
‘It was me that found the bodies,’ Chick explains to me. ‘The old guy was dead with a huge morphine overdose. His wife poisoned. She’d obviously given birth. Elder daughter was never found but her dress turned up in the river — identified by a man that she’d had it off with the day before the murder, so presumed drowned. The younger daughter . . .’ Chick pauses and looks at Nora ‘. . was missing, along with the bairn, the car, the diamonds. The only thing that wasn’t missing were your fingerprints on the poison and the morphine. Heid-yins were called in from Dundee,’ Chick says glumly. ‘Soon every police force in the country was looking for one Eleanora Stuart-Murray. Big case,’ Chick says, ‘big case, famous in its day.’
‘I never thought you did it,’ Chick says to Nora. ‘You seemed like a nice lassie. I’d seen you at that ceilidh, dancing with that big farmer’s laddie, what was his name?’
‘He doesn’t have one,’ I tell Chick.
— Robert, Nora says sadly, he was called Robert.
‘The evidence was against you,’ Chick says to her. ‘I’d have done the same in your shoes, I’d have legged it. Any more tea in that pot?’
— I ran to save the child, Nora says.
‘From what?’ the ‘child’ asks.
— From Lachlan, from your self, from the past you didn’t know about yet.
I have no mother, no brother, no sister, no father. I do not want to be a person who opened their eyes on the world for the first time and saw their mother dead. I don’t want to be a person who set foot on earth only to be tossed back into water, like a fallen leaf, an abandoned sweet wrapper.
— The first thing you saw was the moon, Nora corrects me.
‘And that makes it all right?’
I would like my self to be given back to me. I would like a mother, father, brother, sister, aunt. I would like a family dog and a family car. I would like to live in a traditional thirties semi with a swing in the garden and I would like to eat lamb chops for my tea, with potatoes and peas and afterwards a Victoria sandwich cake made by the hand of a genuine mother.
‘Jam and buttercream?’ Chick says, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.
— Well, I can’t give you that, Nora says, but I can tell you what happened afterwards and of how you came to dry land. For I was not the only thing to snag on the fallen tree in the river. As I was trying to drag myself out of the water I noticed something caught by a branch. I heard its cry —
‘Its?’
— Yours. I heard your cry even above the noise of the rushing water. The lacy matinée coat had hooked itself onto a branch and you were bobbing around like a baby made of cork rather than flesh.
I managed to get both of us out of the water and back to the house where I warmed you up as well as possible. I was sure you were going to die. There were plenty of clothes for you. Mabel had knitted a layette that would have done for quadruplets. When I took off your soaking things I found her little crucifix around your neck, it was a wonder it hadn’t strangled you.