— Must I? Nora asks. Can’t I go to the toilet or make a cup of tea, answer a ringing phone or commit any other number of tedious distractions?
‘No. And we have no phone.’ Even the postman doesn’t knock here, not even once. ‘Tell me about your beautiful sister who died on the day that I was born.’
Nora sighs a sigh so profound that it fathoms the bottom of the sound.
— This is a very far-fetched tale, she warns, which you will find hard to believe. So . . . first there was Deirdre — who died — then Lachlan, then a year later came Effie, conceived in a thunderstorm, born during an earthquake.
‘In Scotland?’
— A small one. It happens. Occasionally.
‘Very occasionally.’
— She was born on the winter solstice when there is no light in the world and everything has shrunk back into the earth. Born when the earth sleeps, yet Effie never seemed to rest and had soon worn out a rather fragile Marjorie. To look at Effie you might have thought that she was possessed of a salamander nature, that her elements were air and fire or some insubstantial matter, but in truth she came from some dark underground place. A spiteful sprite, a malevolent kelpie. Only Lachlan could put up with her and that was because he was made from the same flawed clay. They were never more their true selves than when they were together.
The pair of them were wild, undisciplined creatures. Neither Marjorie nor Donald seemed to know what to do with them. Marjorie had never really recovered from having three children in as many years and soon resorted to the comfort of the gin bottle and Donald was, of course, quite old by then and he’d never been particularly interested in his children, so Lachlan and Effie’s upbringing was left to a succession of nursemaids and nannies. These were all eventually driven away, there was even a rumour that one nanny had been hospitalized — something to do with flypapers and cocoa — and one of the downstairs maids had certainly been paid off with her arm in a plaster. They were the sort of children who could always be found in the vicinity of an accident. Marjorie called it mischief and downed another gin.
They were sent away to school eventually, Lachlan to Glenalmond to follow in the family tradition, Effie to St Leonard’s. Their behaviour improved a little once they were separated but nonetheless it was a wonder they were never expelled. And they still had the holidays to run wild together and torment every living thing.
They roamed the woods and fields like gypsies, sticking pins in caterpillars, cutting worms in half with their pocket penknives, catching fish and smashing them on rocks. There was some incident with the gamekeeper’s cat, apparently — it was found hanging from a tree with its tail cut off—
‘Are you sure you’re not making this up?’
— Why would I do that?
Their favourite place was the loch. No-one else ever went there any more. It was a gloomy place with its black water and its overhanging willows, surrounded on all sides by overgrown woodland. The man-made channels that had once fed and drained the loch had become clogged over the years so that it always had a rank, stagnant air about it. Occasionally, a long, dark pike-shaped shadow passed through the clouded water like a small enemy submarine.
When he was seven, Lachlan threw his sister into the loch — that was the kind of boy he was. By the time she dragged herself out amongst the half-rotten bulrushes she had learnt to swim. That was the kind of girl she was.
‘That was when she became a water-baby?’
— Yes.
‘Then what?’ My mother (who’s not my mother) is not very good at this storytelling lark, is she? ‘And she was beautiful?’ I prompt, which gains a reluctant ‘Yes’ on Nora’s part. ‘In what way?’
— The usual — blue eyes, Titian hair, round limbs, high breasts. Personally I always thought her eyes were too far apart. Made her rather frog-featured. She bit her fingernails down to the quick.
‘What about her personality?’ Nora shrugs. This is like pulling teeth. ‘Incomplete sentences will do, single words if necessary,’ I urge. ‘Try adjectives, for example. Start with “A” if it helps.’
Nora takes a deep breath—
— Abhorrent, blameworthy, catty, dreadful, empoverished (spiritually, obsolete usage), fearless (or fearsome), garrotted (should have been), histrionic, indolent, jadish, karmic (bad), left-handed, mean, negligent, oligarchic, psychopathic, quarrelsome, reckless, sly, tyrannical, ugly (inside), vain, xenoglossiac—
‘Really?’
— Might have been. (Quite a) yachtswoman, a zombie. The living dead.
‘No redeeming features, then?’
— No.
‘No saving graces at all?’
— No.
A bad case of sibling rivalry, it seems. But then Effie was fourteen years old when Nora was born and away at school, wasn’t she? And how did a gin-sodden Marjorie and an ageing Donald manage to have another baby, even an ‘afterthought’?
‘Go on, carry on with your unlikely tale.’
— Effie grew up, eventually. Got married, got divorced (twice), died. End of story.
‘You can’t do that.’
— It’s the post-modern day and age. I can do what I want.
My mother is not my mother. Her sister is not her sister. Lo, we are as jumbled as a box of biscuits.
Chez Bob
‘You’re back!’ Brian’s voice boomed out of the depths of The Crab and Bucket.
‘I haven’t been anywhere, you daft pillock,’ Madame Astarti said, fighting her way past the draped fishing nets and glass floats that made up the interior decor of The Crab and Bucket — or The Crab as it was known affectionately by the locals. It was the kind of pub that holidaymakers went into thinking it looked authentic and interesting (it smelt of raw fish) and hurried out of again without even having put glass to lip. This was not so much on account of the gloomy green underwater lighting or the dead stuffed fish in glass cases around the wall, as the unwelcoming hostility of the natives. If Custer had had The Crab and Bucket’s regulars on his side he would have lived to stand another day.
Madame Astarti did not even have to glance in the barman’s direction — a melancholic man called Les (or Les Miserables, as the locals called him behind his back) — for him to put out a glass and start filling it with a large measure of gin and a token splash of tonic.
‘I,’ Brian said cheerfully, ‘have been to hell and back.’
‘Don’t exaggerate, you’ve been shopping in Scarborough with Sandra,’ Madame Astarti said, heaving herself onto a bar stool next to Brian. ‘Where is she anyway?’
‘On her way,’ Brian said, plunging his face as far as he could into his glass and inhaling beer fumes. A little spasm of pain crossed his face and he said, ‘Left my ruddy arch supports out.’ Madame Astarti commiserated with him. ‘Ah, Rita,’ Brian said, ‘why didn’t I marry you instead?’
‘Because I wouldn’t have you,’ Madame Astarti said and gave him a sharp rap on his knuckles with her—
— what? Her fan-shaped wafer-biscuit? Her crystal ball? Oh dear God, this was so tiring. I was developing some kind of fever, one of those hot and cold things. I took two paracetamol and went to bed with Bob’s blue teddy-bear hot-water bottle and read The Indian Uprising. Then I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew Bob was lying in bed beside me, claiming to have spent the night in The Tavern — a particularly debauched student watering-hole — which was strange because Shug had telephoned from there an hour earlier asking if I knew where Bob was.
‘If Alice comes,’ Bob said earnestly to me, ‘and either Bernard or Charles comes, Dotty will show up. Bernard and Edward will either both come, or both stay away, and Alice will put in an appearance if and only if Charles and Edward are both going to be there. So Dotty won’t be there if Alice isn’t.’