The current McFluffy was sleeping in a nest of shredded Evening Telegraph s, in a cage in the corner of the kitchen. The cage was precariously balanced on top of a Christmas-sized tin of Quality Street, containing five years of unfiled household receipts, and a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling.
Goneril slunk into the kitchen and wound her body like a fat skein of wool around my feet. A piebald queen whose white patches had grown a urine-yellow, like the pelt of an old polar bear, Goneril was an unattractive cat with dead fish breath and slovenly habits that she’d probably caught off Philippa. She was a cat who liked no-one, especially not Crispin, not after an unfortunate accident involving a tab of acid and a tin of Kit-E-Kat during his last long vacation.
Archie put his plate in the sink, already overloaded with dirty plates, burnt baking trays and Pyrex dishes that had acquired an unsavoury patina from years of McCue cooking. On the dull stainless-steel draining-board a huge raw salmon was laid out as if waiting for a post mortem.
‘We’re having a party,’ Archie said, indicating the salmon, rather morosely. It didn’t look like a party-going sort of fish; its silver-lamé scales may have gleamed under the kitchen lights but its dead eye was lustreless and fixed and it had leaked blood onto the draining board. The cat made a great pretence of not seeing the fish.
‘Yes,’ Philippa shouted suddenly from the hallway, ‘Effie should come to the party.’ She appeared in person in the kitchen doorway a few seconds later, carrying a giant-sized tin of dog food. She smelt vaguely of lard. At the sight of the dog food, Duke changed his dribbling allegiance from one spouse to the other, worshipping at Philippa’s big feet like a slavering Sphinx.
‘A few students at the party would be a good idea,’ Philippa said to Archie.
‘Why?’ he asked doubtfully.
‘Because,’ Philippa said impatiently, ‘being popular with students looks good.’
‘Does it?’ Archie said, looking even more doubtful.
‘Bring a friend,’ Philippa said imperiously to me. She would have made a good wife for Macbeth; she certainly wouldn’t have fretted about a few blood spots.
Philippa’s physique was remarkably similar to Duke’s, although, unlike Duke, Philippa was wearing a kaftan. She hadn’t got round to buttoning up the front properly and her jaded, wrinkled bra was visible as well as quite a lot of jaded, wrinkled breast. The hem of the kaftan ended mid-calf, thus revealing Philippa’s unshaven legs, bare despite the inclement weather, growing stoutly out of a pair of red leather clogs that looked as if they were on the run from something Grimm. Philippa had dramatic badger hair — black with a swathe of white through it — which tonight she was wearing in a long squaw braid.
She was quite an embarrassing sort of person really, constantly referring to menstruation and sponge tampons and vaginal examinations so that she made women’s health sound like car maintenance. A stalwart of the university women’s liberation group, she was always urging us to examine our genitals in hand mirrors and stop shaving our body hair.
‘Right,’ Philippa said, making her way to the front door with Archie, myself and assorted animals tailing after her, ‘there’s food in the fridge if you get hungry, Effie, no sweets for Maisie, make her do homework, remember no television — except Tomorrow’s World because that’s educational, sort of, but she has to go to bed straight afterwards — the Dean’s phone number’s on the table if you have an emergency.’ Finally rattling to a stop, Philippa shrugged herself into an enormous Mexican-style poncho. She was still clutching the tin of dog food and I wondered if she was taking it with her to the party instead of a bottle of wine. Or just trying to drive Duke to the brink of insanity — a state of mind you had to judge, not from his expression of terminal canine ennui, but from the amount of dog slobber he was producing.
Archie, meanwhile, was admiring himself in the hall mirror, smoothing his hair and adjusting his tasteless kipper tie. Despite having a physical resemblance to a large sea-mammal, Archie was under the impression that he was attractive to women, which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, he was. (‘Maybe you’re not a woman?’ Andrea suggested.)
‘Of course,’ Archie said to me, via the medium of the mirror, ‘I don’t believe in bourgeois crap like dinner parties, it’s just a means to an end. Right,’ he said, finally satisfied with his appearance, ‘I’ll be off. Don’t take any nonsense from you know who.’
‘Who?’
‘You know,’ Philippa said. ‘The old mare.’ (Or at least, that was what it sounded like.) She was halfway down the path by now and she turned and shouted, ‘Catch!’ and bowled the tin of dog food underarm to me. Philippa had once been captain of Cheltenham Ladies’ College cricket team. And somehow she still was.
I found Maisie in the living-room watching a Monty Python re-run. I retrieved a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut from my bag and broke it into two and shared it with her. It covered several of the major food groups and hadn’t been contaminated by the McCues’ kitchen.
‘Thanks,’ she said, cramming most of the chocolate into her mouth at once. Nine-year-old Maisie was the most normal of the McCues (in some ways anyway). She was a plain girl, with straight hair and thin limbs and a mathematical turn of mind. Photographs of a newlaid Maisie in the overheated maternity ward of the DRI, showed her lying in a plastic cot like lidless Tupperware, looking like a small, skinned mammal, apart from a little thatch of mouse hair on her head. Even at six hours old, she seemed unaccountably old.
Maisie’s full name was Maisie Ophelia. I can’t help but think that it’s an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn’t bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it’s true they are much harder to find. (‘Ratty’ and ‘Mole’ are Maisie’s suggestions.)
‘Do you have homework?’ I asked her.
‘Not really,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the television.
‘I do,’ I said gloomily, taking George Eliot out of my bag. I commenced to write very slowly — James’s judgement that Middlemarch is an ‘indifferent whole’ is refuted by even a superficial reading of the novel, when we cannot help but be struck by the highly wrought nature of the writing, the function of character, the careful thematic structuring and the balancing and illusion of autogenesis, something for which the paralleling of action and moral consequence — but then I must have fallen asleep again because the next thing I knew I was being rudely awoken by a scream and it was a little while before I understood that the scream had come from the television set, rather than one of the various inhabitants of the house.
Maisie was deeply engrossed in a black-and-white horror film of some kind. The woman who was screaming — tall and blond with her hair in a perfect French pleat and apparently called Irma — seemed to have realized (rather late in the day) that she had stopped for the night at a bed and breakfast run by a vampire, even though you would have thought, as B and B names go, ‘Castle Vlad’ wasn’t exactly ‘Sea View’ or ‘The Pines’.
‘She’s really thick,’ Maisie said admiringly.
I tried to shift position; I was incredibly uncomfortable — Duke was slumped heavily on my feet while curled up in my lap, like a large evil netsuke, was Goneril. Not only that, but Maisie’s bony body was sticking into me on one side, while on my other side, an old woman I had never seen before was fast asleep, her head lolling uncomfortably on my shoulder.