‘Let me go,’ Mrs Macbeth insisted, heaving herself out of her chair with enormous difficulty and zimmering to the front door. She hirpled back – looking smaller than ever – with a waterlogged Kevin, his hayseed hair plastered to his head by the rain. Since lunchtime he’d developed a huge pimple in the middle of his forehead, like an angry caste-mark.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asked by way of greeting.
‘Babysitting,’ I said, which wasn’t, technically speaking, quite true, as I seemed to be sitting everything except a baby. He followed me into the living-room and sat down, looking awkward in the presence of so many women at different stages of their lives. He stared at Mrs McCue’s feet, securely encased in bootee slippers with sturdy zips. Mrs McCue glanced down at her feet to see if there was anything interesting about them.
‘That’s some plook you’ve got, son,’ Mrs Macbeth complimented him.
‘Thank you,’ Kevin said, slightly confused. He blew his nose to cover his awkwardness – a large trumpeting noise that unsettled the already too-twitchy cat – and then sat his acreage of flesh down heavily in an armchair (which is just how small rodents are unwittingly killed). Maisie strained to watch the progress of a curling-stone across a television screen that was being partly blocked by the bulk of Kevin’s body.
‘I came to talk to Dr McCue,’ Kevin said, inspecting the contents of his handkerchief.
‘He’s not here.’
‘I can see that.’
Like everyone else of my acquaintance, Kevin was looking for an extension on the deadline for his dissertation (on The Lord of the Rings, naturally). ‘I’ve been spending too much time in Edrakonia,’ Kevin said, a look of wistfulness passing over his face at the very mention of the place. The spot in the middle of his forehead glowed. ‘The dragons have been mustering their forces for a spot of counterinsurgency.’
‘The dragons?’ Mrs Macbeth echoed, glancing warily around the room.
‘Don’t worry,’ I reassured her, ‘only Kevin can see them.’ Kevin was eating Iced Gems by the handful, in a mindless way that would have disturbed Andrea.
‘Explain something to me,’ I said to him, because, to my irritation, I took a strange interest in Edrakonia. ‘I can’t understand whether the dragons are good or bad.’
‘Well,’ Kevin said earnestly, ‘historically, the dragons of Edrakonia do have their own system of ethics, but you have to remember, of course, that it’s a school of moral philosophy of an essentially dragonish nature and the ordinary mortal – you, for example – wouldn’t recognize it as containing the simple tenets of “good” and “bad” which, for dragons, are—’
‘OK, Kevin, that’s enough.’
For some reason Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth got quite excited when Kevin told them he was ‘a writer’ and started urging him to read something to them. Kevin always carried his writing around with him, bits of papers like talismans.
‘Well,’ he said doubtfully, ‘I’m in the middle of a chapter, and it’s the fourth book, so I don’t know if you’ll understand what’s going on.’
‘It disnae matter,’ Mrs Macbeth said, ‘the beginning, the middle, the end – it makes no difference.’ She would do well in Archie’s class.
‘Just fill us in quickly,’ Mrs McCue encouraged, ‘you know – characters, a wee bittie plot and we’ll soon get the hang of it.’
‘Is there going to be a moral to it?’ Mrs Macbeth asked.
‘Well, everything’s got a moral,’ I said, ‘if only you can find it.’
Kevin hesitated.
‘Just begin at the beginning,’ Mrs McCue coaxed.
‘And carry on until you’ve finished,’ Mrs Macbeth added.
After a short resumé (And the Murk will fall on the land. And the Beast Griddlebart will roam the land and the dragons will flee), Kevin settled down and began to narrate in a portentous tone, undermined somewhat by the clotted cream of his accent: ‘Duke Thar-Vint of Malkaron mounted his steed Demaal and prepared himself mentally for the long journey. His trusty steward Lart rode beside him on one of the sure-footed shaggy brown ponies bred by the horse breeders of the Mountains of Galinth –’
‘Are the mountains a good place to breed horses?’ Mrs McCue asked thoughtfully.
‘Well, it’s a good place to breed sure-footed ones,’ Kevin said irritably. ‘Can I continue?’
‘Aye, on you go, son.’
‘Lart had helped his master, Thar-Vint, to strap himself into the bronze armour that had been handed down, father to son, father to son, by the Lords of Malkaron –’
‘Is that grammatical?’ Maisie asked, although she had given no indication of listening at all, having now become absorbed in a late-night Gaelic teaching programme, silently mouthing the inscrutable vocabulary.
‘I don’t know,’ Kevin said impatiently. ‘Thar-Vint’s thoughts strayed to the great palace of Calysveron and the Lady Agaruitha to whom he was secretly betrothed, despite the objections of her mother the Lady Tamarin –’
‘Lady Agga who?’ Mrs Macbeth said.
‘Agaruitha – A-g-a-r-u-i-t-h-a.’
I wondered how much time Kevin devoted to making up these ridiculous names. Quite a lot, I suspected. (Or, on the other hand, not much time at all.)
‘My lord,’ gasped a man who had ridden up hastily by his side. Thar-Vint recognized him as the Lord Vega, whose lands stretched from the River Voloron to the provinces of Celentan and Ggadril. The Lord Vega doffed his velvet cap with the single plume of feather and spurred his steed away to –’
‘Doffed,’ Mrs McCue said, ‘that’s strange word, eh?’
‘It sounds … historical,’ Mrs Macbeth said, ‘it’s not a word you hear often these days.’
‘That’s because men dinnae wear hats the way they used to,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘There were times,’ she said to Maisie, ‘when hats had names – the trilby, the fedora—’
‘Homburg,’ Mrs Macbeth offered, ‘the porkpie.’
‘The porkpie?’ Kevin queried doubtfully.
‘Yes indeed,’ Mrs McCue affirmed, ‘the Glengarry, the bowler, a nice Panama in the summer.’
‘Doff,’ Mrs Macbeth said dreamily, ‘doff, doff, doff. The more you say it the dafter it sounds.’
‘It would be a good name for a dog,’ Mrs McCue said, looking at Janet noisily asleep at Mrs Macbeth’s feet.
‘Do you mind…’ Kevin said. ‘And spurred his steed away to…’ I nodded off. I think I preferred it when Kevin was writing about the dragons.
When I woke up he had gone.
‘What a tube,’ Maisie said and Mrs McCue agreed. ‘Aye a gey queer laddie,’ she said.
* * *
Prompted by some innocent small talk on my part (‘So did you always live in Largs, Mrs McCue?’), Archie’s errant mother raided her spangled memory and embarked on her life story, a commonplace enough tale, I suppose – a broken heart, a lost child, death, abandonment, loneliness, fear. This was the condensed version of her life story, naturally, otherwise we would have been there for seventy-odd years. We came up to date with her current mooring at The Anchorage.
Before long Mrs Macbeth was unpicking her own life for me – she had been a jute spinner in the Dens Road Works and the first time she tried to get married she was ‘jilted at the altar’. Why is it that everyone has had an interesting and dramatic life except for me?
∼ Don’t be so sure, Nora says.
Mrs Macbeth’s fiancé was already on an émigré boat to Canada when she was stepping into the church in full bridal finery on her father’s arm. Mrs Macbeth shook her head sadly and said that she had never quite recovered from this betrayal. ‘Although I take comfort,’ she said, contemplating an Iced Gem, ‘from the fact that he’s deid the noo. And I married Mr Macbeth and we were very happy together.’
‘Mr Macbeth’. How odd that sounded, as if the Thane of Cawdor had decided to give up on ambition and settled in the suburbs and worked towards his pension.
‘It all seems lik
e yesterday,’ she concluded sadly.
‘Aye, you dinnae age inside,’ Mrs McCue said; ‘inside you’re aye young.’
‘How young?’ Maisie asked.
‘Twenty-one,’ Mrs McCue said.
‘Twenty-five,’ Mrs Macbeth said.
∼ Well, personally, Nora says, I feel a hundred years old.
But you must excuse my mother, she has led a very strange life.
Once started, neither Mrs Macbeth nor Mrs McCue seemed inclined to stop – I suppose that by the time you’re old you have acquired quite a lot of things to talk about (your whole life, in fact) and after a while I just let their lullaby voices wash over me without really listening. They were talking about people in The Anchorage – Miss Anderson (‘a crabbit wee wifie’), Mrs Robertson (‘a nice wee wifie’) and Billy (‘a poor soul’). Many of these people appeared to be in the grip of strange notions. Miss Anderson, for example, had a terrible fear of premature burial, while Billy was convinced that his dead body was going to be stolen for (unspecified) nefarious purposes. Mrs Macbeth herself seemed disturbed by the idea that no-one was going to check that it really was her body in the coffin and not one belonging to someone else (although you would think that might be a good thing).
‘Mistaken identity,’ she said. How grisly these preoccupations seemed for people with a view of the water. Something, Mrs McCue said, was killing the old people. Not just old age then? I asked.
‘No,’ Mrs McCue said airily, waving her knitting needles about in a dangerous fashion, ‘I know for a fact that someone’s trying to kill me.’
‘Oh aye,’ Mrs Macbeth said cheerfully, ‘me too.’ I thought of Professor Cousins who had said exactly the same thing to me only this morning (what an incredibly long day it was turning out to be).
‘Just because you’re paranoid,’ I said to Mrs McCue, ‘it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ She gave me a worried look.
‘So who do you think’s trying to kill you?’ Maisie asked, finally finding a topic of conversation more interesting than television. ‘Dad?’
Mrs McCue laughed and said fondly, ‘Archie disnae have the balls for murder.’
‘Look at poor Senga,’ Mrs Macbeth said, shaking her head.
‘Face like a tatti-howker, but a harmless wee wifie,’ Mrs McCue said.
‘Do you really think she was murdered?’ Maisie asked, a thrill of excitement in her voice, but at that crucial dramatic moment we were interrupted (naturally) and the noise of the front door being unlocked set in train the usual commotion of barking dogs, hissing cats and dropped stitches. Mrs McCue cocked her head like a dog, behaviour that was mirrored by Janet, and said, ‘That’ll be them,’ so that for a moment I thought perhaps she meant her imaginary assassins until reality took a grip and I realized it was Archie and Philippa, home from the Dean’s.
Duke lumbered to the door to greet them, while Maisie fled and threw herself under her bedcovers, feigning a child who had been asleep for hours, watched no television, eaten no sweets and done all her homework. The rest of us conducted a charade of sober purposefulness – I took out a pen and furrowed my brow while Mrs McCue managed to add a stitch or two to her mysterious weaving and Mrs Macbeth produced a yellow duster from about her person and rubbed hard at a lamp on the small table next to her chair.
Philippa went straight upstairs while Archie, glassy-eyed with drink, fought to get himself through the door-frame of the living-room.
‘Good to see you’re finally getting down to some work at last,’ he said to me. He frowned at his mother. ‘Still here?’ he said. ‘You’ve missed the last bus, you know.’
‘Aw, son,’ Mrs McCue said affectionately.
Philippa clacked downstairs in her clogs. ‘Sleeping like a baby,’ she announced.
‘Who is?’ Archie asked, looking vaguely alarmed as if Philippa might have given birth to yet another McCue while she was upstairs.
‘Ferdinand,’ Philippa said, in the tone of voice she reserved for people incapable of doing compound-propositional logic. ‘How was the old Ma?’ she asked me, as though Mrs McCue wasn’t in the room. ‘And her friend,’ she added, giving Mrs Macbeth a doubtful look. Mrs Macbeth spat on the duster and rubbed hard at the lamp as if she was conjuring up a genie.
‘Must be going,’ I said hastily. Much as I would have liked to learn more about the handsome jailbird sleeping upstairs I felt I’d had enough for one day somehow.
‘Come and see us,’ Mrs McCue said. Mrs Macbeth nodded vigorously in agreement with this invitation. ‘In our jile,’ Mrs McCue added with relish.
‘The Anchorage is a very nice place,’ Philippa said to me. ‘It came highly recommended by Grant … or Watson … or whatever – the old Ma’s friend over there is his mother-in-law.’
‘Dozy wee bugger that he is,’ Mrs Macbeth agreed cheerfully.
Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth seemed far too sprightly to be in an old people’s home but as if she read my thoughts (a terrifying idea) Philippa said, ‘They’re not as capable as they look, you know. They’re always having accidents. The old Ma’s forever falling and breaking bits. We thought we’d get her in before she started to deteriorate.’
‘Thanks,’ Mrs McCue said.
Mrs Macbeth and Mrs McCue waved to me from the doorway of the living-room. After a struggle, Mrs Macbeth had hoisted Janet up in her arm and was now waving her paw for her like a puppeteer. Archie accompanied me down the hallway, taking up most of the space, so that I had to squeeze past him to get to the front door. He usually chose the hallway as the locale for the obligatory pass he made at all female students who strayed within the walls of his domain. Tonight it was a half-hearted affair that I managed to sidestep quite easily due to the night-long transfusion of red wine into Archie’s veins.
* * *
It was a relief to get into the outside air although an evil kind of sleet was now falling (which is a cold, hard rain by another name). The Perth Road was completely deserted but it was only a short distance home and I was comforting myself with the fact that at least there was electricity when all the streetlamps went out. Then, all of a sudden, I began to feel apprehensive. I was all gooseflesh and was overcome by a strange sense of dread, as if something malevolent was about to befall me in the shape of apparitions or ghosts, mad people and axe-murderers. I quickened my pace.
A woman was walking towards me, carrying a long furled umbrella and wearing a red winter coat that had been leeched of most of its colour by the darkness. There was something about the woman that was both familiar and foreign, as if she reminded me of someone. There was something odd about her too – a slight stumble in her walk, a lopsided look to her face. As she drew near, she called out and asked me the time. She was close enough for me to smell the gin on her breath, almost doused by the strident perfume she was wearing.
My sense of foreboding had grown so strong that I hurried past her without looking in her face, mumbling that I didn’t have a watch. I glanced anxiously behind me but the woman had disappeared. A sudden wink of light behind me made me think of The Boy With No Name until I realized it was a car, headlights extinguished, cruising very slowly along at a distance behind me. I quickened my pace and by the time I reached the top of Paton’s Lane I was running. The car didn’t turn to follow me and I paused for a moment in the doorway and watched it glide past the top of the street. It gave the distinct impression, I noticed, of being Cortina-shaped.
Heart thudding uncomfortably in my chest, I ran up the unlit stone stairs of the tenement. The darkness at each corner of the stair seemed to have a thicker quality, as if the shadow of a ghost was skulking there. There was a smell of fried food and something sweet and cloying. This was probably what it was like to be trapped in The Expanding Prism of J. Or a horror film. It was with an overwhelming sense of relief that I turned my key in the lock and achieved the safety of the inside.
* * *
Frozen to the bone, we are in the great cold kitchen where the lichen grows between the s
tone flags beneath our feet. The old oak barometer in the hall is indicating a curlicued ‘Storm’ and Nora, as salty as an old sea-dog, taps it and says, ‘The glass is falling,’ and I feel a melancholy tug inside me as if my body had its own tides and currents and can feel the pull of the moon. Which it can, I know.
Nora is boiling a copper kettle on the range, a complicated process that involves us first having to collect driftwood on the strand. Why does she live like this? I swear it’s colder inside than out. We would be better off building an igloo. To help us with this idea it has begun to snow. Nora says, it never snows here, as if the snow had made a mistake.
I lay out the old chipped Spode cups and saucers. We drink our tea black for we have no milk cow, nor a good red hen, not even a single honey-bee.
We sit and drink our tea at a kitchen table where resentful servants must once have sat. Living here is like living in a folk-museum, actors in A working kitchen, circa 1890, except there is no-one to observe us. Or so we hope.
∼ Is any of this going anywhere? Nora asks, staring into her teacup like a fortune teller.
‘Well, it’s leading here, eventually. As you know.’
∼ It’s a rather roundabout route.
‘There aren’t any maps. You see if you can do better then, tell me about Douglas.’
∼ Who?
‘Your brother.’
* * *
Nora closes her eyes, takes a breath, begins –
You have to remember this was long before I was born, so I have to imagine it. It started out well. Donald Stuart-Murray had a house in Eaton Square, one in Edinburgh’s New Town and endless ancestral pastures north of the border centred on his own glen – Glenkittrie – and a bloodline intimately entwined with the kings and queens of Scotland, and therefore England. He married the third daughter of an English earl, a plain, rather nervous girl, whose family were relieved to have her off their hands. The bride wore some exquisite family diamonds – a dowry-gift to mitigate her shortage of aristocratic qualities – and when she walked down the aisle the wedding-guests gasped in admiration so that the young bride, who was called Evangeline, blushed with joy, thinking they were silently applauding her efforts at beauty.
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