She’d not been young either when she had favoured those big skirts like flowers, but she had taken good care of her appearance with the result that she’d the waistline younger women had lost to the reproductive urge. Not that old, mind, but approaching an age about which to be discreet. Esme had understood that, of course.
What age Esme had been Miss Carnegie did not know. She could have made enquiries, there were plenty of folk must have known him at school and then at the University, but she preferred a little haziness, a little of what she liked to refer to as romance. The more veils it dons the closer romance sidles to untruth, but Grisel was for beauty over truth, fortunate, perhaps, when all was said and done, at Glenbervie.
The china birds were cast in attitudes, the attitudes of real birds, which no real bird will hold for longer than an instant. The effect of many colourful frozen creatures, shiny, without the softness and blur of feather, tapping a coy ceramic snail or arrested on a frosty twig, was lightly deathly. The birds were demanding when it came to dusting, more demanding than one living bird might have been about its seed and water. But Grisel had forsworn living pets when she left her Pekinese with Ailsa and Carl.
‘Taking that dog, it’s like a matrimonial visit,’ Carl would tell Ailsa when he got home. God, he was pleased to get home, too. You never knew the meaning of the word ‘home’ till you’d been to a place like Glenbervie for the best part of a day, including the drive. ‘She holds on that tight to the bloody dog’ – he set it down now on the coir matting in their front hall – ‘and it has nothing at all to say to her and looks guilty and embarrassed and desperate for a cigarette.’
Neither of them disliked the dog that much or they would not have relented about having it put to sleep when the warden at Glenbervie explained that dogs were not ideal for the ambience of the residential complex. The baby weeded at the dog’s rich coat for hours, and kissed its squashed face. The Peke permitted liberties from the baby it would have bitten off at the knee in anyone else. Indeed, the dog’s and the baby’s size, gait and expression were increasingly similar: each could look outraged or appealing, each was prone to soon-forgotten rage. But the animal would keep its glamour as young humans rarely do, although baby Rhona was one of those changelings who astonish by their dissimilarity to plain parents, so dog and baby were a strange, bewitching pair, frailly matched for the time being.
Once Carl had his drink and Ailsa was sitting over from him on the other sofa with the dog and the baby in a tangle at her side making, it had to be admitted, a regrettable state of the sage velvet stripe, he began his story of the day. The way to tell it was to save the marrow in the bone till the end, to worry at the tale until it split and the nourishing part was there at last. For Ailsa, so certain of her own freedom from dependence – even upon Carl, who was after all only a man – the cream of the joke was always Esme, how he came in to the fortnightly encounter of her husband and her aunt-by-marriage as they sat in the sheltered chalet in the shadow of the whatname hills surrounded by china birds and pecking at food intended as festive and failing in that intention, an inch of fish here, a jot of jelly there, and lashings of Carnation milk for a treat. The Carnation came in a lovat-green earthenware jug marked ‘Brora’. Not that she’d been any of these places, the old coot, but it did make present-giving simple enough. Just keep your eyes peeled for a place-name and snap it up. Sensible un-dependent Ailsa had no patience for bits and bobs, it was like clothes, a waste of time and money just to give yourself allergies with the dusting or, in the case of clothes, acute discomfort. Ailsa favoured the untailored, the non-iron, the elasticated.
It was appalling to see how Grisel still kept all that nonsense up, with her assisted hair and the kitten heels to her old lady’s shoes. Surely she could shut down on her appearance now? She’d been playing that tune all her life. Might it not be a relief to change stations? Tune out of being feminine, tune in to feminism maybe. Ailsa loved her feminism, it was so dependable a comfort. She knew she would cope fine if Carl was inconsiderate enough to leave life before she did. She was a natural coper, so she thought. She knew what was what, she often said, only very occasionally acknowledging the disappointed voice within that asked if this was it, was there nothing more, nothing along the lines of what she sometimes glimpsed in her sleep or heard in music or flowing water, a sheen in the air.
Carl was spinning out the drive, making it all as boring as possible, partly to make Ailsa feel bad but also, she hoped, for they were not on bad terms, to whet her appetite for any fun to come. ‘So eventually I get off the A9 anyhow and cruise down to the Alpine Village itself. Usual smell of rubber briefs and grey potatoes and a wee dab of cologne for the Sabbath. I’m dying for a drink, of course.’
She knew what to ask. ‘Gay Paree? Romantic Rome?’
‘It was London this time, and a sherry. She must have laid it in for me. Mobile shop service looking up.’
‘Just the one?’
‘Two out of her and one solo in the kitchen.’ That’ll be five in all, thought Ailsa.
‘She serves out the dinner slow so it’s cold on those ferocious hot plates and sizzling but chilly, the Brussels still frozen at the middle and smelling like cats on the outside. I put Carnation on the mashed-potato balls just for some variety. Christ, have me put down by the time I’m old, will you not?’
I will, Ailsa thought, don’t worry. Illness had no place in her understanding of the world. But I, she continued in her strong mind, intend to live for a long time after you are gone, and always to be myself and do as I will. It did not occur to her that she might ever become an old lady in a colony of old ladies, cooking bland food for ungrateful connections, and shopping from a van full of tins. She would be splendid, and wilful, and eat garlic. No one would discuss her after visiting her save with admiration.
‘Yellow jelly?’
‘Red jelly.’
The baby tried to copy her parents, ‘Ledlellyälellylelly.’ The parents dismissed this primitive vocaläising. The dog jumped down off the sofa one end before the other, it was hard, beneath the hair, to tell which, and shimmered over to the fireplace. There was no fire in the grate but a white paper fan, made anew by Ailsa annually to fill the fire basket in the summer months. She was good with her hands, undomesticated but stylish.
The baby followed the dog to the fireplace with the vehemence of reunited love. The two, dog and baby, big-eyed, snubnosed, took up their places before the empty fire. It was not yet dark outside, the city had not settled down beneath its skyline. Carl made to get another drink. Ailsa took his glass from him. In the pocket of his jacket was the remains of a packet of dry roast nuts he’d got at the filling-station. He tipped the lot into his mouth while Ailsa fetched the new drink. She made it weak. It wasn’t so much the health side of his eating and drinking that bothered her – what would be would be – but she was put off when he had overmuch to drink. He grew slobbery, asking for reassurance, even declarations. To make up for the weakness of the whisky she caressed his neck when she returned and pretended to be more interested than she was in his relating of the day at Glenbervie. She concentrated with the top of her mind on recollecting, detail by detail, the living-room of Grisel Carnegie; the rest of her mind she allowed to swim. She didn’t need a drink to find an easy drifting movement to her thoughts. Unadmitted dissatisfaction had given her a talent for dreaming that she would have denied utterly. But the truth was that alongside her marriage to Carl and the tiring business of having Rhona, she ran dreams in her head like films without end. Their matter was not dramatic, but softly eventful. She was not a heroine but an object of curiosity, even longing, to unspecified, unnamed creatures, perhaps not even men. The glow of anticipation and undisturbed aftermath was the climate of her lower, denied, dreaming.
What Carl and sensible Ailsa could not take about his aunt was the way she made of her eventless life a romance, as though that life had been enough for her. It was a way of rationalising a totally pointless existence, they agreed.
The titivation, the unconsummation, were all part of a sickness which only in recent years had been shaken off by women, that much was obvious. Now women not only knew what they wanted, but went after it and got it, not like Grisel with her net petticoats that had netted nothing, and her silent china companions and dreams of a man who’d lived with his mother and gone to dancing classes in his fifties. Illusions, breakable illusions, was all Carl’s aunt had, he thought. Look at Ailsa, now, she’d never wander like that in her thoughts, yearning for something nobody could put a name to. He prided himself in knowing what was in Ailsa’s wee mind, he really did. Like now, he knew it would be the room at Glenbervie, the flock of motionless birds.
Beneath that picture, which was indeed in Ailsa’s mind, hovering at the surface of it, something stirred and fluttered, never quite roosting. The texture of her dreaming was light but dense, like a field of high flowers, like a net in slow water. Something was approaching her, something wonderful, over the meadow, through the water.
‘I gave her the dog to hold and she held on to it as usual like grim death and it pulled its wally dug face.’ They looked up at the china dogs, one either side of the mantelpiece, their snub noses, big eyes, painted whiskers, unbearably appealing pathos. Each dog had a clownish sorrow to its face. The baby and the living dog played below the china dogs, the pleated white fan behind them in its fire basket. The two were staring into each other’s faces, seeming to grow more alike as they stared. On the mantelpiece the china dogs made a quaint guard for the drift of invitations and reminders ranged along the mantelpiece. Carl and Ailsa were a busy couple. It was unthinkable that they would be halved, one half or the other bereft. Death wouldn’t get an appointment squeezed in, their schedule was that busy.
‘She’s ageing fast, now. The winter might just do it.’ Carl was realistic. Everyone had to go sometime. They’d put the dog down then with an easy conscience. Rhona would for certain be too young to notice.
The baby gave up the staring match and grabbed the dog by both ears to pull its face to hers. The pair kissed and began to roll about and yelp and wag before the grate empty of warmth. The china dogs had a wily look to their faces if you looked harder. The painted freckles on their flat muzzles were just like those of the Peke. Fluent painted lines feathered their china feet. Ailsa knew for a fact wally dugs were not the same as china bluetits. They were vernacular Scots ornaments, not substitutes for love.
Something quite warm and tender was about to take place in Ailsa’s dream. She felt its approach like the opening of a door which has been ajar.
‘Esme came in to it a new way, today,’ said Carl, turning the pinky finger of his left hand around in the deep hairs of his left ear. He’d been feeling furred-up, slow, lately. ‘I wasn’t even angling for him yet, and up he leapt into the conversation. The old thing just looked me up and down after I’d eaten and said, “Esme Stewart was a lovely-looking man, slim, with remarkably mannerly ways.” How I had put her in mind of him I don’t know, but I took it as a compliment.’ He cleared his throat, pulled up his trousers by the belt which encircled the flesh below his belly, and rose to fetch another drink.
Catching on the silky loops of dog and baby at his feet, he tripped heavily, only saving himself by grabbing at the mantelpiece and keeping a hold on it to keep from falling on the two small creatures. Shocked, child and dog disentangled in one movement, like springs, and sat up alert, paired, huge-eyed, frozen by the hard tinkle of china all about them from the smashed wally dug whose widowed companion stared Ailsa hard in the eye as she felt the beautiful, romantic thing that had been approaching her recede.
‘I’ll get you another drink,’ Ailsa said to Carl, angry enough to want to kill him.
Homesickness
‘Doesn’t look too good, does she?’
‘Nor him.’
The women were not talking quietly. They were loading up for the week. They did this together, after yoga. Gert was a lot older than Sophy; Sophy admired Gert because she had had cancer and got it beat. That took mind-effort. Gert had taken up yoga after the cancer, in gratitude for God’s irrational dispensation. She’d taken up Sophy then too. She found Sophy funny, she was so eager to have something to believe in. Gert believed in a number of things, none of them comforting. She was trying out fads now, things about which she as a rule felt sceptical. She was relieved by the short lives of fads. She did not believe in the future.
Now they were at the healthfood shop. Gert could not have cared less about carob chocolate substitute; she had been raised on bread and dripping, so meatily, richly, delicious, its memory gave you a wet mouth. But coming to the healthfood shop was for Gert like going on safari. You saw a number of alien and touching pieces of the creation. While Sophy was stocking up with sacks of organic puffed rice and pots of smooth cashew butter for her three boys, Gert collected her own requirements for the week. She had throughout her life eaten modestly and without much interest. Yet she had somehow managed to induce, encourage and nourish a poisonous growth within herself. She felt responsible for her cancer, as though she had become carelessly pregnant. Now she continued to eat modestly, but she took an interest. She read labels and lists of ingredients. Provenance concerned her. She felt that, at least, if she were to get another go of cancer – for her it had no nickname – the monster would be fed on good food. Meanwhile, she did wonder how well her diet of moulded glutinous rice and seaweed extracts was maintaining her self, the self outside where the cancer had been. She found the notion of such care expended upon unimportant choices intriguing. Would she have chosen thread with such care, or paper? Where did the discriminating consumption end? Was not everything in the end corrupted and poisoned? She had been taught that the pollutant was original sin, but now she was told to believe that sin had begun again, with the partition of the atomic apple. A bite taken from the rounded whole, and invisible poison, considerably less visible than sin, had seeped out, burned those close to it, and stained all air.
Who was to say where it ended? If we are all to live in fear should we not find each other equally appealing in our common humanity, victims together, illuminated by the flare of threat?
The truth was, Gert found the couple who ran the healthfood shop very unhealthy looking. She was amused when Sophy, who was of their generation after all, agreed with her that they did not look well.
‘Doesn’t look too good, does she?’ asked Gert, conscious she was breaking a convention, and was gratified to hear Sophy reply, ‘Nor him.’
The broken convention was twofold: it was not right in Sophy’s opinion to make judgemental remarks; it was not good to imply that a – presumed – diet of perfectly screened foodstuffs conduced to anything but a perfect body, not perhaps in terms of beauty, but of health.
Sandy and Janet had come down from Kintyre to run the shop. There weren’t many shops like this one up there, though there was something of a community of beardies round Oban, and a big demand for tofu from all the Chinese in Stornoway. But round Campbeltown there wasn’t much in the way of a herbivorous movement. Pasties, bridies, mutton pies, puds and saveloys in batter were the thing up there, and bags and bags of crisps, also the kind of ice-cream which looks like turbans made of fat with a Tunnock’s snowball on the side on a good day, making an ice-cream oyster to be eaten in the hand. And ‘broon coos’, the same ice-cream in a big paper cup of Coke, like frothy gravy to look at.
What made Sandy laugh was when folk down here said, ‘You must miss all that delicious fish.’ He knew they were thinking of sturdy fishing smacks and fresh cod like a steak of sea-meat. No dice there, with the French diving deeper and deeper for clams and sending the stuff down to London places. Anyhow you’ve to do a hell of a lot to a fish or a mollusc or whatever till you get it a convenient morsel fit for leisure eating. Only dead-rich folk want to bother with food that’s hard to eat, lobster and oysters and all. Crab sticks was the shape of the future. Sandy had two aunties who gutted white fish on Barra and hadn’t felt their hands i
n years. They couldn’t fancy fish but when it was in finger form, out of the deep freeze in the post office.
Wait Till I Tell You Page 7