‘What are you after today, Rita?’ Lolly said, wringing her hands together like a woman with a dreadful secret even though the expression on her face was one of extreme, almost excessive, cheerfulness.
‘Small white farmhouse, please,’ Madame Astarti said and then laughed and said, ‘maybe I should go to an estate agent’s for that?’ but Lolly just looked at her blankly with a fixed smile on her face.
‘Never mind,’ Madame Astarti sighed.
‘And a bit of a treat for elevenses?’ Lolly said, and together they conducted the ritual of surveying the trays of iced fancies and cream cakes.
‘Jam doughnut?’ Lolly said. ‘An Eccles cake?’ The thin strain of a slightly wobbly whistle could be heard coming from the back. It sounded to Madame Astarti like ‘Oh Mein Papa’. She’d never thought of it as a frightening tune before.
‘Chelsea bun?’ Lolly went on, a mad look on her face. ‘Chocolate eclair? Iced teacake? Cream puff?’
I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the woman who had been watching me in Balgay cemetery was standing in front of me. I flinched and stood up too suddenly, making myself dizzy.
‘Why are you following me?’ I demanded. Close up, I could see the alcoholic’s skin, mottled like a reptile, see the lines in her sun-cured face. Her hair looked brassy and green as if she spent too much time in over-chlorinated swimming-pools.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, her accent hard and tight, South African perhaps, or Rhodesian; ‘I wonder if you can help me — I’m looking for my daughter?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Effie.’
‘No, I’m Effie,’ I said. I was beginning to feel sick. It was too hot in the hospital, like an overheated greenhouse.
The woman laughed but in a strangled, off-key kind of way and it struck me that she might be insane.
I struggled to make sense of her. ‘You’re my mother’s sister, Effie? You’re dead,’ I added, rather impolitely.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not her sister.’ But then a nurse walked briskly up to me and said, ‘You can go in and see your dad now if you like.’
‘My dad?’ I repeated, bewildered. The woman began to walk away, her too-high heels stabbing the hospital linoleum. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after her but she had already pushed her way through the swing doors and disappeared.
I felt weak, as if I was going to faint. I was probably the one who ought to be admitted to a ward, not Dr Dick. (But who would I put as my next of kin? My mother is not my mother. Her sister is not her sister. Her father is not her father. My father is not my father. My aunt is not my aunt. Et cetera.)
‘Cubicle three,’ the nurse said.
Of course I knew it was Dr Dick in cubicle three not my anonymous father choosing a bizarre location in which to come back from the dead, but for just a moment, as my hand went out to draw the curtain back, I felt a little shiver of excitement. If it was my father lying there what would I say to him? More importantly what would he say to me?
Dr Dick was examining the cast on his ankle. ‘I’m sure it’s not the only thing that’s broken,’ he complained without even looking at me, ‘and they wouldn’t listen when I told them I was tachycardic, they could at least have run an ECG. And I banged my head, how do they know I haven’t got concussion?’
‘Did you tell that nurse you were my father?’ I interrupted him.
‘Of course I didn’t,’ Dr Dick said indignantly. ‘I’m not even old enough to be your father, although I feel it,’ he added, lying back on his pillows. He removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘My head hurts,’ he said again. I had to admit, he did look exhausted. I felt an unusual twinge of pity for him and reached out and clasped one of his hands in mine. He smelt of Savlon.
‘You’re a good girl,’ he murmured. Like all hypochondriacs, Dr Dick was distressed at finding he actually had something wrong with him and ended up making such a fuss (‘Is he often hysterical?’) that the junior house officer on duty decided it would be easier to keep him in overnight than it would be to persuade him to go home.
I was shooed away by a nurse with a bedpan who whisked the curtains around the bed with great theatricality as if she was about to perform a disappearing trick on Dr Dick. I hung about for a minute, unsure what to do until the nurse suddenly popped her head through the curtains and said, ‘This might take some time. Don’t worry,’ and then added, with routine cheerfulness, ‘we’ll take good care of your dad.’
It felt very late, although the clock in reception only said nine o’clock.
‘Bye,’ the receptionist said indifferently, ‘take care now.’
It was snowing outside, big, wet flakes that whirled dramatically in the wind but dissolved as soon as they landed on the ground. They found their way inside the collar of my coat as I trekked along Dudhope Terrace against a strong headwind. A bus sailed by like a ghostly galleon. Dudhope Castle, cloaked in a swirl of snow, seemed to glow eerily as I passed it. The street was deserted and I began to feel anxious. I glanced behind but the snow made phantasmagoric shapes in the dark that made me more nervous so I kept my head down and shuffled on. Where was Chick when you needed him? Or better still Ferdinand, who had been absent from this tale for far too long.
— Yes, bring Ferdinand back, Nora urges. You left him stranded on a beach, it’s time he returned. He’s the only remotely sexually attractive male in the entire story.
(You must forgive the eagerness of my mother (who is not my mother). Remember — she is a virgin. Not to mention a murderess and a thief.)
We must pause for a second. We have come to a critical fork in the path. If I had a choice of white knights on chargers come to save me — admittedly only from the weather, but it was very bad weather — which would I prefer, Chick or Ferdinand? A foolish question surely, for there could be only one answer —
The snow was beginning to settle thickly and most of the traffic had stopped but I could just make out the yellow headlights of a car, moving slowly towards me along the Lochee Road. The car was almost obscured by the snow as it slewed to a gentle skidding halt on the other side of the road. It was a Wolseley Hornet. The driver’s window rolled down and Ferdinand’s handsome features resolved themselves out of the white kaleidoscope of snow.
‘Hop in,’ he said, in a curious echo of the ambulance-man earlier in the evening. Here was excellent good fortune.
The Hornet presented a perfect contrast to Chick’s Cortina. Its new-smelling interior was warm and its little engine chugged manfully through what was now a raging blizzard. It even had a tape-deck fitted on which John Martyn’s ‘Bless The Weather’ was, fittingly, playing.
Ferdinand seemed somewhat edgy. He hadn’t shaved recently, which made him look older and more dangerous. His eyes, I was relieved to see, were green and the dark hollows beneath them hinted at sleeplessness and the criminal in him seemed more evident than before. His navy-blue Guernsey, I noticed, was spiked with needles of coarse yellow dog hair. There was sand on the floor of the car and the slight brackish scent of the seaside that I knew only too well.