‘First stop Spandau,’ Mrs McCue said loudly as Mrs Dalzell snapped at her heels.
I followed them out of the cemetery, while Maisie pirouetted down the path. We were just in time to see Professor Cousins being herded onto the minibus. I shouted to him but he didn’t hear and it was Chick who hooked him by his thin elbow and steered him away.
‘If he goes in that place he’ll probably never get out again,’ he said to no-one in particular. Some bizarre sleight-of-hand then proceeded to take place whereby Janet was stuffed back in the shopping-basket and furtively returned to her rightful owner — Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth behaving throughout like rather poor amateur actors trying to recreate a Bond movie.
Chick looked at Maisie playing chalkless hopscotch in the rain. ‘I suppose you want taking home,’ he said gruffly to her, ‘whoever you are.’
‘Her name’s Lucy Lake,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully.
We got in the car and set off on the usual narrative detour — betting shops, off-licences, et cetera, even a rather lengthy sojourn for Professor Cousins and Chick in The Galleon Bar of the Tay Centre Hotel which Maisie and I preferred to sit out in the car, playing ‘Switch’ with Chick’s tasteless playing-cards.
Our route to Windsor Place took us past the university, now a hotbed of activity, people coming and going with a restless energy not hitherto witnessed on those premises. A crowd of people had gathered outside the Tower, from the fourth-floor balcony of which a bed sheet had been hung on which, in red paint that looked like blood (but presumably wasn’t), someone had written the words THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE HORSES OF DESTRUCTION.
‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Chick said, slowing down as a group of people spilled into the road. ‘Fucking students.’ Catching sight of Maisie in the rear-view mirror, he added, ‘excuse my French.’
‘I’ve heard worse,’ she said phlegmatically. ‘Look — there’s Dad,’ she exclaimed, pointing at a figure standing on the grass outside the Students’ Union. ‘Dad’ turned out to be Roger Lake — fired up, in oratorical mode, shouting and gesticulating for the benefit of a small group of students.
If Maisie carried on much longer with this charade she would forget who she was. ‘He’s not actually your father,’ I reminded her.
‘Really?’ Professor Cousins said to her. ‘And yet you look so much like him.’
Professor Cousins clambered out of the car and snailed towards the Tower. It was at that moment that I noticed an ambulance was parked up ahead, obstructing the road, and adding to a general sense of drama around the environs of the university. Chick started hooting the Cortina’s horn impatiently. An ambulanceman glared angrily at him and mouthed something I couldn’t understand, although the gesture he made seemed clear enough. He was helping his partner to load their cargo — a seemingly unconscious body, strapped on a stretcher.
‘Oh look, it’s Spotty Dick,’ Maisie said excitedly. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’
I craned my neck to get a better view — she was right, it was Dr Dick on the stretcher. His carcass was wrapped in a red blanket that made him look even paler than usual, did indeed make him look rather dead. I got out of the car and went over to his limp form. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.
‘Do you know him?’ one of the ambulancemen asked.
‘Sort of,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘What happened to him? Was he injured in the demonstration?’
‘What demonstration?’ the ambulanceman said, looking round. He spotted the banner and read out, ‘The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of destruction — what does that mean?’
The ambulanceman, although quite short, was young and had sandy hair and kind eyes and the capable manner of all men in uniform.
‘What does anything mean?’ I said, smiling at him. He smiled back.
‘Excuse me,’ Dr Dick said, struggling into a sitting position, ‘am I going to expire here in the street while you flirt with this . . .’ he struggled to find the right word, ‘this girl?’
The ambulanceman looked at Dr Dick and said mildly, ‘You seem lively enough for someone who’s expiring.’
‘A very professional diagnosis,’ Dr Dick said sulkily, flopping back onto the stretcher.
‘What happened to you?’ I asked him again. ‘Were you caught up in the protest?’
Dr Dick squinted at me unattractively. One of the lenses in his little academic spectacles had acquired a crack, giving him an oddly glaikit look. His eyelashes were pale and rather stubbly, like those of a pig. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. He seemed reluctant, however, to explain how he had ended up on the stretcher and it was the ambulanceman who finally told me that Dr Dick had slipped on an icy pavement and cracked his ankle bone. He grimaced, although I wasn’t sure whether this was from the pain in his ankle or the unheroic nature of his injury.
— Icy? Nora queries. It was raining a minute ago.
‘You’re not the only one who can control the weather.’
‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ the ambulanceman said. ‘Casualty’s full of old wifies who’ve done the same thing.’
‘Thanks,’ Dr Dick said. He motioned me closer to him and hissed in my ear, ‘I think I was pushed. I think someone tried to kill me.’
‘Pushed off a pavement?’ I repeated incredulously. ‘Wouldn’t they have pushed you off something higher if they’d wanted to kill you?’
‘Hop in,’ the ambulanceman said to me. I hesitated.
‘Do. Please,’ Dr Dick said weakly.
I was trying to think of a good reason (although really I had several) not to go in the ambulance when Chick suddenly drove off in a great crashing of gears, hooting noisily as he overtook the ambulance.
‘What a tube,’ the ambulanceman said.
Maisie waved cheerfully at me as the car sped by. I recalled the image of the yellow dog being driven away in much the same manner and wondered what the chances were of Maisie arriving home.
‘Thank you,’ Dr Dick murmured to me, ‘you’re a good girl.’
In the DRI we took some time at reception, mainly because Dr Dick couldn’t think of who to put down as his next-of-kin. It seemed to be a toss-up between his ex-wife Moira and myself and despite my protestations that I wasn’t related to him in any way he finally chose me. Also at the reception desk was a Spanish-looking woman with a nail stuck in her hand. When I glanced at the form she was filling in I saw that in the space where it said ‘next-of-kin’ she was writing ‘Jesus’. Perhaps she was a friend of Janice Rand. She gave Jesus a surname (Barcellos) which, to my knowledge, was more than anyone else ever had.
After a long wait, during which I engaged in the most desultory of conversations with Dr Dick — mostly about his childhood ailments (measles, German measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, mumps, glandular fever, plague) — a nurse came and said, ‘Dr McCrindle will see you now,’ and took Dr Dick into a cubicle to be examined behind garish flowered curtains that must have offended his taste.
A lot of time passed without anything happening. The peeling beige paint on the waiting-room walls was relieved only by a poster encouraging me to brush my teeth after every meal. Dr McCrindle came out of Dr Dick’s cubicle and smiled at me wolfishly. More time passed. A student nurse ran down the corridor, shouting, ‘Jake, come back.’ More time passed. I read my way through a pile of the People’s Friend, looked through my George Eliot essay, which had got as far as, James’s dislike of George Eliot’s stylistic method is rationalized into the strange statement that, ‘Its diffuseness . . . makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction’, which wasn’t very far at all and, finally, I wrote some Hand of Fate —
‘Good morning, Rita,’ Lolly Cooper said cheerfully, ‘lovely morning, isn’t it?’ Cooper’s was an old-fashioned sort of bakery, the baking still done at the back of the premises by Lolly’s husband, Ted. Rumours abounded in Saltsea about Ted’s terrible temper. He was a dusty, flour-clad presence, a kind of éminence blanche, who whistled all the time in a manner that Madame Astarti found faintly menacing. Lolly, on the other hand, was a frilly sort of woman with fluffy hair who wore Peter Pan collars or big soft kitten bows tied at her neck. Madame Astarti always imagined that Lolly Cooper kept a very neat house with a well-stocked fridge and sets of matching towels, something Madame Astarti herself never expected to achieve.