A light appeared in the distance, less alien and monstrous than before but nonetheless bobbing across the darkened landscape like a will-o’-the-wisp. As the light got closer it started to resolve itself into not, as I’d hoped, a bus, but a car. The car slowed to a halt beside the bus-stop and the driver leant over and opened the passenger door.
‘You’ve missed the bus,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get in.’
I got into the car and slammed the door. ‘You are following me, aren’t you?’
‘In your dreams,’ Chick said.
Until very recently, time had been a slow slurry of nothingness for me; now the days were suddenly packed to overflowing, a turn of events that I found surprisingly unwelcome.
‘A dragon?’ Chick queried mildly, as if I’d said something as unremarkable as ‘a door’ or ‘a Dandie Dinmont’.
To pass the time as we travelled the road and the miles to Dundee, Chick gave me a brief and reluctant rundown of his curriculum vitae: ‘Tulliallan Police College, three years as a village policeman in teuchter land because the cow had a hankering for it, the birth of the bairns, the move back to Dundee when the cow got bored of teuchter land, joined the CID, Lanzarote, blah, blah, blah, the rest is history.’
‘Blah, blah, blah?’
Chick took a half-bottle of Bell’s from his pocket, took a large swig and then handed it to me. The whisky tasted sour and made me gag, but I kept it down.
‘Good girl,’ he said. We were silent for a long while and then Chick said reflectively, ‘I was a good policeman, you know.’
‘I believe you. Did you work on any famous cases?’ I asked him, thinking about The Hand of Fate, wondering if Chick could be some help with police procedure, modes of detection, and so on.
He gave me a sideways look and after a while said, ‘I worked on the Glenkittrie case. Ever hear of that?’
‘No.’
‘Famous in its day,’ he said, draining the dregs of the whisky.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Some other time,’ he said and peered into the empty bottle as if he was trying to conjure up more whisky.
When I cast a glance at Nora I see she has grown pale as any corpse during the course of this innocuous tale.
— You’ve got a party to go to, she reminds me, very like someone who is trying to change the subject.
I had completely forgotten about the McCue party and certainly had no intention of going.
I must have fallen asleep.
‘You fell asleep,’ Chick said when I woke up. I had been sitting uncomfortably with my head resting against the door of the car. I was numb with cold and the whisky had left a bad chemical taste in my mouth. Chick was reading the Evening Telegraph by the light of a torch. He lit a cigarette from the stub of the one in his mouth.
There was a familiar look to the street we were parked in but it took me a few sleepy seconds before I registered that we were in Windsor Place, parked right outside the McCue house.
The McCues were en fête — from where I was sitting I could see into the brightly lit living-room. I could just make out the faint vibrating thum-thum of rock music. Several people who looked as if they had last danced around the time of the Suez crisis were capering to the music — but in a constrained way, shuffling their feet and occasionally doing something daring with their elbows. Grant Watson was one of them, turning pink with exertion as he pushed his limbs around out of time to the music. I decided I would be in more jeopardy inside the McCue house than I had been in the hands (or whatever) of a rampant dragon.
The party looked dire, although I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a good party. Perhaps there is a perfect form of merriment somewhere but what its constituents are I do not know and cannot imagine.
— Fireworks, Nora says dreamily, and Chinese lanterns strung in trees and the moon reflected in the water.
I could see Philippa trying to encourage the Dean to dance. She was bouncing around in a tent-like dress, patterned in psychedelic swirls of purple and brown. The Dean was trying to pretend he was somewhere else — the Caird Hall perhaps, listening to the SNO in concert, or, preferably, lying in his bed fast asleep next to the flanneletted body of his wife, a large matronly woman called Gerda, currently in rayon and being propositioned by a swaying Archie.
A different tableau-vivant could be observed in the adjacent window, which looked into the dining-room. I could see Professor Cousins daintily sipping sherry while talking to Martha Sewell, who was wearing sober black. In the background I could just make out Dr Dick having a furious fight with Maggie Mackenzie.
‘Why are we here?’ I asked Chick.
He shrugged. ‘Who knows.’
‘No, I mean, why are we here?’
‘Why not?’ How annoying Chick was. How strangely Bobbish. When I informed him that I was supposed to be at the McCue party he tried to shoo me out of the car and into the house (to see if anything fishy was occurring, naturally). I steadfastly refused, even though I could see that there was much material for narrative there — the drunken faux pas, the misaligned relationships, the forbidden sex, even plot advancement — but none of that was enough to tempt me inside.
A woman appeared at the dining-room window, a glass of red wine in her hand. She gazed into the street, an abstracted expression on her face. For a moment I couldn’t place her because she was so out of context and then I suddenly recognized her — it was the Hillman Imp woman, the woman we had been watching in Fife.
‘It’s the Hillman Imp woman,’ I hissed at Chick and he said, ‘I know,’ from behind his Evening Telegraph.
‘What’s she doing here?’ I said to him. ‘I don’t understand.’
I watched her move away from the window. The next moment she reappeared in the neighbouring room and walked up to Watson Grant. He paused in his inept dancing and lurched drunkenly towards her, pulled her into his arms and started kissing her neck — an unattractive activity that she endured with rather a long-suffering expression on her face.
‘So she is having an affair,’ I said, ‘there’s your proof. She’s having an affair with Grant Watson. You should photograph them or something.’
‘Nah,’ Chick said, dragging hard on an Embassy, ‘that’s his wife.’
Chez Bob
UNBELIEVABLY, IT WAS ONLY EIGHT O’CLOCK WHEN I got home. I ate Cornish Wafers and Philadelphia cream cheese; I watched the news, although I turned it off when it showed trees being napalmed. I read Me and Miss Mandible and listened to After the Gold Rush; I washed out a pair of tights and sewed on a button. I ate more Cornish Wafers, but I had run out of Philadelphia. I wrote a halfhearted sentence of Henry James (James’s implication is not only that the novel is episodic and fragmented but also that it is a vehicle for far too much analytic and philosophical intrusion on the part of the author herself —) until finally I went to bed only to be woken a couple of hours later by Shug and Bob rolling in with a couple of traffic cones and a clutch of warm rolls from Cuthbert’s all-night bakery. Of my mysterious promised visitor there had been no sign at all.
— Have you guessed who she is yet? I ask Nora, who is chewing on a Jacob’s cream cracker from a packet she’s found in a tin at the back of a cupboard. I can smell its staleness. Nora has coiled her hair up in a careless heap and I can see fiery little tendrils curling at her neck. Today our hair is very red on account of the rain that is threatening us. For we live in a raincloud. Nora says she can feel the rheumaticky weather in her bones. She says she is a human barometer.