One November afternoon Vera and Nanny took Lulu and Janet to the dentist. The dentist was in Aberdeen, forty miles away, an unending journey by car. Before they left they had to clean their shoes, brown Start-Rite walking shoes, taking the laces out and laboriously rethreading them when Nanny had approved the gleaming leather. By this point Janet was already feeling sick. Whenever they went anywhere by car they had to clean their shoes; as Janet was sick every eight miles, sometimes sooner, the merest whiff of shoe polish, the sight of a polish brush, the texture of a yellow duster sent her stomach into churning mutiny. After the shoe ritual they were clamped into their good tweed coats with velvet collars, berets were jammed on their heads, gloves found, and they were off.
Lulu looked charming, her blonde hair waving prettily beneath the navy blue beret; Janet’s beret was dark green and did nothing to enhance her complexion. It kept slipping sideways; she pulled it firmly onto her forehead, where it made a tight welt and pushed her eyebrows downwards, giving her a fierce Neanderthal look. Vera wore her driving headscarf, printed with the flags of the allied nations and bearing the slogan “Into Battle,” many times repeated. She drove with verve, anxious to minimise the number of times they would have to stop for Janet to be sick. They had tried travel pills, they had tried dragging a degrading chain behind the car, leaving all the windows open, putting Janet in the front, all to no avail. Nanny had banned her from eating anything red or orange for twenty-four hours before any journey on the grisly premise that this was the cause. “I’ve aye noticed it when the bairn spews up.” No good. Now a new theory was abroad. Constance had said that Janet must stop thinking about herself, must concentrate on others or at least on other things. “You’ve no difficulty the rest of the time in concentrating; you can learn your Latin and your poetry, so really, speaking candidly, I think you’ve just got to get out of yourself; take an interest in the landscape, talk to the family, play spelling games.” The crime of self-centredness had been added to the miseries of her condition. She always looked at the landscape anyhow; she was far better at spelling than her brother and sisters, so games with them were boringly limited. And she didn’t want to talk to her family; she couldn’t think of anything to say to them. Instead she silently rehearsed a poem which had made her laugh so much that tears came out of her eyes when she discovered it the previous evening.
It occurred to her now that Lulu looked pretty much like Old Caspar’s awful little grandchild. Lulu turned, caught Janet’s broadly grinning and sarcastic stare, and pinched her sharply on the calf. Janet pinched her back, harder. A silent struggle ensued; then, “Mummy, Mummy, Janet’s pinching me.” “Miserable little clipe,” muttered Janet, subsiding to the far end of the seat. She stared out of the rain-dashed window, where the light was already fading. They were passing out of the hills, over the crossroads, towards the bare stone-walled pasturelands where the few trees hunched and bent inland, straining away from the bitter blast of the sea wind, their branches clawing vainly for the shelter of the glens. The hills stood enigmatic and shadowy, guarding their own.
thought Janet, looking back at them with a strange yearning. She felt that she was being borne away from the lands of high romance and magic towards a bleak world of making do and commerce and department stores and petrol fumes; headscarves and gabardines. Looking at that grim and vengeful sea she could imagine the satisfaction with which it had disposed of Sir Patrick Spens’s lords and their plumy hats and their cork-heeled shoon.
Was the mermaiden drinking the blood-red wine or was she somehow holding a mirror and looking in it amid the green billows?
There was a clicking noise beside her and a rush of cold air. The far door was swinging open. Lulu was gone. Silently Janet leaned across and closed the door. She sat rigid, her mind spinning. “Oh God,” she prayed, “bring her back, let no one notice, let them not blame me.” How long would they not notice? Could she jump out? They were driving along the stretch of cliff road above the dreadful caves once inhabited by Sawney Bean and his descendants. Sawney Bean had run away with a maid from the great house where they both worked; they were wanted for theft; they would be hanged. They hid in these caves and kept themselves diverted and alive by making man-traps on the high road to Aberdeen and consuming their prey. When the law finally tracked them down they found a pullulating tribe of Beans, mainly the issue of incestuous unions, but still guided by the patriarchal Sawney. Smoked black flitches and plump haunches of human flesh were suspended from the cavern walls drying, in the salt breeze; the babies cut their teeth on finger bones. They were all burned in Aberdeen market square, the last cannibals in Europe. Or so it was said. Janet wished that one of Sawney’s man-traps would gape open in the road and the car plummet into it. Anything rather than the doom which waited for her.
squeaked a mad voice in the back of her brain. The car slowed for the first traffic lights of Aberdeen. Vera glanced back, grimly helmeted by the “Into Battle” scarf. “Lulu, sit up!” she commanded. “Lulu, what are you doing? Are you down on the floor? Get up at once. Janet, where is LULU?” “She got out,” said Janet. Her gorge rose. “A while ago,” she said and vomited mightily.
In the event things were not so bad as she had feared. They found Lulu, muddy and grazed, soaked through and without her beret, sitting on a roadside bank surrounded by a comforting group of farm workers and their bicycles. She was holding court and showed no particular pleasure in Vera’s fervent embrace or Nanny’s insistence that she travel home in the front, on her knee. In fact, she said she wanted to go on to the dentist so that they could have tea at Fuller’s in Union Street afterwards. For a moment Janet was roused from her sombre apprehensions by this redeeming notion. Fuller’s was the good thing about trips to the dentist. With faces frozen by the sleety wind and the jaw-scrunching needle they would step from the granite street and the granite sky into a warm lamplit haven. The carpets were pink and dense so that you moved soundlessly; there were no windows; you could forget the outer world. Teaspoons clinked on porcelain saucers, tiered stands shone, laden with the snowy glory of Fuller’s walnut cake. Reverently the waitress raised the silver dome from a fragrant mound of buttered toast, flaccid and dribbling with amber rivulets. “Jerusalem the golden, with milk and honey blest,” thought Janet. And, like that heavenly vision, unattainable. For the numb jaw and tongue, the rubbery lip, flawed and mortal, could not cope. But it was enough to sit in that rosy hush and feel its benediction, watch the hard faces of the women in their hats grow gentle and animated. Fox tippets were discarded, carelessly slung on chair backs so that their glassy eyes and snappy jaws were invisible. There was twinkling, there were indiscreet confidences and girlish laughter. Extravagant quantities of tea were drunk, lavish tips lurked coyly beneath emptied salvers. Men did not come here. Once Vera had lured Hector in on the grounds that it was his duty to help her cope with five children. As they emerged from the Ladies’ Room they saw Hector staring moodily at a light fitting while baby Caro, beside him in a high-chair, poured scalding tea in an unsteady stream onto the pink carpet. Later he had removed the largest chip from Rhona’s plate and placed it on his shoulder; then he waited through the rest of the sacred hour for someone to ask him why he had a chip on his shoulder. No one tried to get him into Fuller’s again.