“There’ll be a piper,” I said to Mike, “be prepared. Someone’s bound to arrange it, they have to.” And so they did. And if you’re going to have to hear that wailing sound, there’s an argument that says let it be at a funeral, at a burial, when its keening and skirling will get to you. (It did.) And if the weather’s wild and wet to go with it, then so much the better. Though there’s a degree of wet, wild weather, you might think, that will defeat even the efforts of a bagpipe. Never mind the poor little birds, trying to sing in the rain.
My own deluge of grief couldn’t quite drown out the suspicion that this was some last sly joke of my father’s. He was smirking, somewhere, at the whole scene, he’d even whisked up the weather. And it was all my fault, perhaps. If, short of making him a grandfather, I’d at least levelled with him and told him the score — Dad, you’re never going to be a grandfather — then my conscience would have been squared with him. But how would that have cheered him in his last remaining years? He cheered himself up, instead, with a third young wife, called Georgina York, who wasn’t, as her name suggests, in the least bit Scottish.
I said to your dad, “You’re going to have to meet a few Campbells. And I’m afraid you’re going to have to meet Fiona.”
But perhaps it was all just, simply, ancestral. All just the urging (is there any real basis for it in biology?) of the blood in his veins. My dad, the lambswool laird. Take me back, please, to where I came from. I felt, in any case, that little twist of treachery, mixed with a strange twist of pride: me, the daughter and only true child, the star, in one sense, of the show, alongside those three — let’s use this word if I can’t use the other one — witches.
In any case, I felt bereft.
My father travelled up in his coffin, in an undertaker’s vehicle, before we did. We resisted all thoughts of travelling with him (he surely wouldn’t have expected that) in grotesque, five-hundred-mile convoy. We drove up separately, deciding, in the painful circumstances, not to attempt the whole trip in one day, but overnighting en route — in a hotel overlooking Lake Windermere. Not one of our happiest hotel experiences. In the night the windows began to rattle. The bed felt like a raft. It was February, but until then greyly mild. The next day the choppy waters of the lake signalled worse to come, further north.
But before all this we’d had to arrange other, temporary, away-from-home accommodation. It’s one of the guilty drawbacks of cat ownership and it’s worst, the pang is sharpest, if you happen to be travelling, yourself, for sheer pleasure. But then again, if the reason is your father’s funeral…
We used to take Otis to a place we’d found, in Carshalton, called, ridiculously, Felix Lodge, which traded on the notion that your cat too might really be enjoying a high-class, country-club-style break from it all. It was really just some rows of large wire cages set among trees, a few potted plants thrown in. Your dad told me — after Otis died — that it had always made him think of his father’s wartime captivity.
And that occasion for depositing Otis was as wrenching as they’d ever been. I don’t suppose Otis knew what was going on at all. But then I’m not so sure, given his subsequent behaviour. Who knows what animals know? Does Nelson miss Grandpa Pete? I know that when we left Otis that time — his green eyes staring at us from behind the wire — I couldn’t hold back any more the flood of tears waiting inside me. My tears hadn’t really happened yet, they hadn’t found their moment. Felix Lodge was unhappily named.
But how our big feelings can get drawn out of us by small things. I don’t mean to belittle Otis at all. I’ve often wondered just how much there was in his little green piercing stare. Your Grandpa Dougie’s eyes, for the record, were a deep brown with just a touch, a hint of green. Like your eyes and mine. Your dad once looked into my eyes and called them “seaweedy eyes.” It made my spine quiver. He would say things like that from time to time. He’s not just a scientist. Or a publisher.
My eyes were pretty seaweedy that day, anyway. I cried salty tears all the way home to Herne Hill. Mike had to pull over at one point to comfort me. Poor Mikey, what times he let himself in for when he stayed that night at Osborne Street. He sat in the driver’s seat, holding a box of Kleenex, while on the back seat Otis’s empty white-wired travelling-cage was silently eloquent. I cried enough at my dad’s funeral, in that wind and rain, but I don’t believe I ever cried so wringingly as I cried once at the side of the road, somewhere between Beddington and Mitcham.
Your Grandma Fiona didn’t cry at Invercullen. She was there, at least, and all the real water was long under the bridge. Nor did my stepfather, Alex, who had no particular reason to, dripping as he was with some kind of oil-derived, Texan — Aberdonian wealth. Twenty years my father’s junior.
I suppose if my mother had cried I would have only hated her hypocrisy. Though I suppose there was another scenario: that the two of us might have cried together. Hugging and howling in some awful melting moment of reconciliation. In that freezing weather? So then you might have met her. And Mike, poor man, might have had to deal with her on an ongoing basis. He dealt with her bravely enough on that already challenging occasion.
“The Living World? A science journal? Well, how interesting, Michael…”
And if you’d been there — I mean, already there, or not even literally there but parked somewhere, like Otis, in deference to your tiny status — would that have made all the difference? Softened up her act and made Alex shift uncomfortably, perhaps, on his feet? We’ll never know. It didn’t happen. Your fairy grandmother. Thank God I never said to her, “And we have a cat.”
Undoubtedly the best moment of that wretched start to the year was when we returned to Carshalton (a sunny, crocussy, even spring-like Carshalton, I’m glad to say) to collect Otis. But it was only the prelude to the worst. Some six weeks later, when I was just beginning to learn to live with the absence of my father, Otis went absent too. He went out one night, in his usual cat’s way, but he didn’t return to leap on our bed the next morning, or the next. Or the next after that.
I say “the worst.” Worse than my father’s death? I don’t mean that literally, of course. The second absence was like an ill-timed, small-scale echo of the first? Yes, but I don’t mean that exactly either. I mean that Otis’s disappearance, his mere disappearance, was in itself like a grief. It shouldn’t have been, but it was. And perhaps it would have been even if my father had still been alive. It was a separate grief and, yes — you may even begin to understand — perhaps it went a little further. When all is said, my dear, dear daddy was seventy-seven, and fathers do die at such an age.
You must judge us, my angels. You never saw him, but tomorrow you may need to borrow some of the spirit of your long dead grandfather. There’ll be a lot for you to judge in a few hours’ time.
It so happened that when Otis disappeared Walker’s were handling some recently discovered studies of rustic subjects, including several animals, attributed to no less a figure than Jacopo Bassano. The art world partly lives for such unexpected finds, only then, of course, to become enmeshed in questions of authenticity. And even when the discoveries are judged authentic, there’s the secondary, oddly unsettling thought: that they might have been lost for ever, that not so long ago, in fact, the art world, now giving these precious items its kid-glove treatment, was perfectly happy without them.