Tall and thin and as sensual as a cod, Martha had large beloafered feet that were designed for pounding the paths and trails of New England. She gave the impression of being extraordinarily clean and groomed, as though she curried herself thoroughly every morning. Her smooth hair, somewhere between blond and grey, a colourless colour, was worn in a tidy bob, kept in order by a black velvet Alice band.
Martha had been accompanied to Scotland by her husband, Jay — a professor at Ann Arbor and a Whitman specialist — who had taken a sabbatical to accompany his wife. The Sewells spent a lot of time — certainly more than the average Dundonian — visiting Edinburgh, where they purchased cashmere tartan travel rugs, Caithness crystal, and rare malt whiskies and daydreamed about renting a house in Ramsey Gardens.
Martha and Jay belonged to the class of people who run economies and design legislation, who arrive alive in the polar regions and survive in the equatorial, who invent chronometers and barometers, and mend clothes and darn stockings and never run out of milk or clean underwear. They led the kind of life I could never hope to, especially if I stayed with Bob.
Today Martha was wearing black courts, a grey flannel skirt and a rat-coloured woollen wrap that came down almost to her feet and was carrying a heavy, serious-minded, leather briefcase. Although not directly involved in the war of the departmental succession, Martha seemed to have become a trophy figure and the various candidates vied to have her on their side.
‘You’re busy,’ she said to Archie. Archie denied this self-evident fact, waving his hand dismissively at his students as if we were a figment of Martha’s imagination. Andrea made a gagging gesture as if she was about to throw up.
‘Are you looking for the toilet?’ I asked Martha kindly, but she had caught sight of Professor Cousins in the corner and a shadow of confusion passed across her granite-smooth forehead.
‘He’s sitting in,’ Archie said, making Professor Cousins sound like a student protester. Professor Cousins leant so far towards me that he nearly toppled over in the chair. He jabbed a finger in Martha’s direction. ‘Remind me who she is again,’ he said, in a loud whisper.
I shrugged. ‘Some woman.’
‘Ah,’ he said as if that made everything clear. He folded his hands over his old man’s soft belly and nodded benignly at Martha and said, ‘Sit down, sit down,’ gesturing towards a chair next to Terri. ‘You might learn something,’ he laughed. ‘I know I have.’ Martha looked to Archie for guidance but he just raised his eyebrows as if to say it was nothing to do with him and so Martha reluctantly folded up her awkward grasshopper limbs into the chair, all the while keeping a wary eye on Terri.
Seeing Martha was a blow, I was hoping to avoid her for some time. The creative writing assignment I owed her was another degree paper I was probably going to fail, and to make matters worse my assignment, The Hand of Fate, was a crime novel, the least reputable genre there was, according to Martha (‘Why? Why? Why?’) and I had to pretend to her that crimewriting was a postmodernist kind of thing these days, but I could tell that she wasn’t convinced. Things would have been going better with Martha if I’d had more words on the page, rather than in my head. (How much easier life would be for the poor writers if they didn’t actually have to write their books.) So far I’d got little further than a rudimentary character introduction and a hint of plot —
‘Well, time and tide wait for no woman,’ Madame Astarti said out loud as she heaved her portly shape off the bed. Madame Astarti’s torso would have fitted quite snugly inside a barrel. The only thing she could find to eat in the kitchen was half a packet of stale chocolate digestives. She wondered if there would be any point in going on a diet. She had lost her figure sometime in the sixties and had been unable to find it ever since. She lost it before she arrived in Saltsea. She’d never intended to come here; it was one of those haphazard kinds of decisions (which means no decision at all, merely circumstance). She’d arrived in 1964 with her then husband Gordon McKinnon on a cheap-day return from Cleveland when they’d both been in a rather tired and emotional state. They’d had a long-running argument which had culminated in a nasty moment on top of the Ferris Wheel with Gordon telling her about his personal interpretation of reincarnation — a theory which centred on Madame Astarti’s imminent return as a seagull — but which eventually resolved itself with Gordon returning to Cleveland and Madame Astarti staying in Saltsea. The last she had heard of Gordon McKinnon was in 1968 when he was on the run from the RSPCA. He could be dead for all she knew — an ambivalent state occupied by many people Madame Astarti had once been acquainted with. The could-be-deads, as she thought of them.
After several more cigarettes, and a rather prolonged toilette which included Madame Astarti’s constant struggle with one of the world’s eternal dilemmas — how to apply mascara when she couldn’t even see her face without her spectacles on — she was finally ready.
The telephone rang but when Madame Astarti answered it the line went dead with a purposeful click. ‘Went dead’ — that was a curious phrase, wasn’t it? she mused thoughtfully. Things that go dead, in their various tenses. Electricity, telephones, not people, they didn’t go dead they just were dead. Things that go dead in the night — no, that wasn’t right, was it? Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t in the early stages of dementia. But how do you tell?
She locked up carefully behind her, reasoning it was better to be safe than sorry, even though Madame Astarti had lived most of her life according to the opposite philosophy. ‘Time to go,’ she said to no-one, although—
Professor Cousins startled me by leaning over towards me again and producing a Nuttall’s Minto from his pocket which he pressed into my hand, saying, ‘You’re a good girl,’ as if he had been told otherwise by someone.
I wondered if Professor Cousins was as old as he looked. I was a kind of magnet to old people — at bus-stops and in shop queues they flocked around me, desperate to chat about bus timetables and weather. Andrea, who was frightened of old people (in case she became one, one day, I suppose), said that every time she looked at a baby she thought that one day that baby would be an old person. Personally, I prefer to look at an old person and remember they were once someone’s baby. Perhaps there are two personality types (a half-full, half-empty kind of thing), on the one hand the people who can discern traces of the baby in the senescent and, on the other hand, the depressives that look at the fresh baby and see the demented old crone.
— Wise, Nora amends, wise old crone.
Archie was beginning to get a slightly mad look in his eye. The overheated room and the number of people in it were making him increasingly dishevelled — he had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar and the damp patches of sweat were spreading further and further across his chest like two oceans determined on confluence.
‘. . . or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified . . .’
‘Excuse me, Archie,’ Professor Cousins was waving his hand around in the air to catch Archie’s eye.
‘Yes?’ Archie said stoically.
‘Could you just go back a bit,’ Professor Cousins said genially. ‘I seem to be losing the thread of all this. I’m afraid —’ he turned to Archie’s students with a conspiratorial smile — ‘I’m afraid I don’t have Dr McCue’s brilliant mind.’
Archie trundled his chair across the carpet, a mode of locomotion that made him resemble a particularly inept Dalek, but then stopped abruptly in front of the Professor and started doing strange breathing exercises, presumably to calm himself down, although he gave the impression of someone who was trying to inflate himself.