‘You what?’
‘Aye! He was playing with a bunch of his pals the other day, where they shouldn’t have been, in the garden of a big old house down the street. It belongs to an old man who’s retired from business. This one climbed in a wee window, then fell to the floor and couldn’t get out. The place was dark and the door was locked, so he starts screaming. His pals were afraid of the old boy, so they came running to me.’
I whistled. ‘Jesus, what an error of judgement on their part.’ Beside me, Jonathan, the older wiser, brother, nodded agreement.
‘As they found out,’ said Ellie grimly, with a glance at Colin. ‘The upshot was that I had to ring the man’s doorbell and ask him if he could let my son out of his cellar. He wasn’t very pleasant about it either; chuntered on about getting the police.’
‘That’s right,’ Jonathan chuckled, ‘until Mum ripped into him about leaving his window open in the first place. “It’s an invitation to curious children”, she said.’ I looked at him, astonished. Although he was only ten, he had picked up about five years’ worth of maturity in the two since his parents had split up; on top of that I realised that he had become a terrific mimic. I felt slightly sorry for the old man with the big house; even if Ellie hadn’t been there, he’d have had to deal with Jonathan.
My sister glowered at her younger son. I sympathised with him; as a kid I’d been on the receiving end of that stare. ‘He’s into everything, that one. I’ve told him that next time he gets himself locked in somewhere I’ll leave him there overnight,’ her eyes fixed on mine, ‘just like Dad did with you once.’
The boys stared up at me. ‘True,’ I admitted. ‘When I was about your age, Colin, I used to climb up the step-ladder into our attic. I had a one-man gang hut up there. Parts of it weren’t floored, so my mother was always telling me not to, but I kept doing it, until one day your Grandpa took the ladder away.
‘I thought it was a game until it got dark.’
Prim squeezed my elbow. ‘Pity we haven’t got an attic,’ she said.
‘You can shut up for a start,’ I retorted. ‘Elanore’s told me all about you as a kid. Watering the plants, indeed.’ She shut up.
We had a good evening, the six of us. Wallace spent most of it on my shoulders, Colin spent most of it enjoying having a man at the table, and Jonathan spent most of it chatting Prim up. Once they were banished to bed and the iguana to his cage, us adults settled down to catching up.
As a dutiful brother, I made a point of asking Our Ellie if everything in her life was okay. ‘Not bad, son,’ she assured me. ‘My divorce went through without a hitch. Alan’s being very good about the maintenance money for the boys; comes through by bank transfer on the first of every month. He comes over to see them every couple of months, and they spent the first half of August with him, but of course you’d know that, since they were in your apartment.’ In fact the boys had spent all of the school holidays in St Marti, with their Mum during July and with their father for the rest of the time.
‘Everything’s fine on the job front, too,’ Ellie went on. ‘I got a promotion last week, I like the people I work with, and the school roll keeps going up.’
‘And on the other front?’
She grinned at me; an un-Ellie-like grin, shy around the edges. ‘On the other front, I’m getting enough of the other, thank you very much, and that’s all I’m saying. I’m happy as I am, especially since I learned that a woman doesn’t have to wake up to the sound of a man snoring next to her to live an enjoyable life.
‘I’ve got a lot to thank you for, both of you.’
‘The house is nothing,’ said Prim. ‘You’d have done the same if it was you who won the lottery.’
‘I didn’t just mean the house. I was in a real rut out there in France with Alan, all on my own in that museum village. I was bloody miserable, in fact. Then you two showed up out of the blue, footloose and fancy free, in the middle of an adventure. Right then I saw what my life was compared to yours, and I realised that I didn’t have to put up with it.
‘For a good part of my life, Oz, I tried to set an example for you, as my wee brother. It was a real culture shock to discover that I should be following yours. But you taught me that very important thing when it really mattered.’ She looked at me and said the most tender thing I’d ever heard from her. ‘You saved my life, brither, in a very real sense.’
I grinned at her. ‘You’ve got it wrong, Ellie. I did follow your example; what I became is what you made me, as much as Mum and Dad. After Mum died, you lost yourself for a while, that was all. Not that those years with Alan were a total loss: far from it. See those two through there? Go back twenty-five years or so and they could be us.’
We killed a dozen cold Buds as we sat there looking out of the big bay window at the darkening night across the Old Course, and eventually, at the moonlight on the Eden Estuary beyond. We brought Ellen up to date with our business, with my movie-making and with our wedding plans, which had changed since Prim had laid down the law to her mother in Auchterarder. To be fair to everyone in terms of travel we had decided that we would do everything in Gleneagles Hoteclass="underline" wedding, reception, first night, the lot.
‘And after that?’ asked Ellie.
‘Somewhere sunny,’ said Prim. ‘We’ve never been to Asia; there maybe.’
We were so relaxed come bedtime that we almost forgot to plan the next day, but eventually we agreed that the girls would go shopping in Dundee and that I would ‘do something nice’ with my nephews, as long as it didn’t involve taking them among bawling, swearing men at a football match.
Next morning, I decided that Ellie’s conditions would allow me to take them to see Raith Rovers, in Kirkcaldy; the only bad experience they were likely to suffer there was loneliness. But before then, the big city of St Andrews was ours to explore, with its crowded golf courses, its wind-blown, chilly North Sea beaches, its shops — none of them with the slightest attraction for a ten-year-old, far less for a six-year-old.
Fortunately there’s always the Castle. St Andrews is rich in Reformation history; bloody history at that. I walked the boys along to the Martyr’s Monument on the Scores, erected on the spot on which George Wishart, the unfortunate who gave the thing its name, was burned at the stake. I toned down the details of the story as far as I could, but my nephews eyes were still gleaming as we reached the old ruin further down the road. . kids are sadistic little buggers, aren’t they?
It was still only mid-morning, so the Castle wasn’t busy, with only a few visitors dotted around. ‘See that big window there?’ I said, as we stepped through the entry kiosk. ‘That’s where Wishart’s pals took their revenge. An army of them, with old John Knox among them, took the place by storm, and hanged Cardinal Beaton right there in that very window, for everyone to see. Then they occupied the castle, until it was recaptured by the King’s troops.’
‘Who was John Mox?’ wee Colin piped up.
‘A Reformer,’ I told him. ‘Not a very nice man either, by all accounts. No one was very nice in those days, on either side. In this very castle there’s a thing called the Bottle Dungeon. It’s no more than a hole in the ground, hollowed out of the rock. They used to drop prisoners in there; the walls are smooth and they slope out on the way down, so that they couldn’t climb out, or stand up straight either. The lucky ones had food dropped in; the unlucky ones. . didn’t.’
‘Want to see it, want to see it!’ Colin clamoured.
‘All in good time,’ I told him. ‘There’s something else I want to show you first.’
During the siege of the Castle, after Knox’s, or Mox’s, lot had topped the infamous Cardinal, the occupants had an ingenious idea. They would tunnel out under the walls, give the King’s forces a right doing, and disappear in the confusion. What they didn’t know was that the besieging commander was thinking along the same lines.