Emotionally Weird(103)

And Effie replied, ‘Not if it turns out as dull as the first one.’

‘Is that a clue?’

Nora ignores me.

~ Anyway, eventually she fell pregnant – there was a whole regiment that could have fathered the child but she managed to net an officer and got married.

Then the war ended—

‘How fast time goes in this tale, and you’re leaving out all the details.’

~ There’s not enough time for details. Effie’s husband – I think he was called Derek, but I can’t be sure, he made very little impression on anyone, least of all Effie – was demobbed – I think he was a chartered surveyor. Derek, as we’ll call him, even if that isn’t his name, started talking about buying a nice house in a garden city down south and starting a family. I don’t think it had ever occurred to Effie that he might have a life beyond the war. She left him as soon as she saw him in his demob suit.

Marjorie was dying by then. Donald had had his first stroke. I’d been sent away to school – to St Leonard’s – where all the teachers were suspicious of me because I was ‘Euphemia’s sister’ and I had to work very hard to reassure them I wasn’t like her.

Lachlan was working in a law firm in Edinburgh. He had a squalid little basement flat in Cumberland Street, in the street next to the family’s old New Town house, now home to an insurance office – that’s a detail since you’re so keen –

Effie used to go and stay with him there for days on end after her divorce. They made quite a seedy couple. I have no idea what she did all day when he was at work.

I had to go and stay there once, just before Marjorie died. I must have been thirteen or so. I slept on the couch and Effie said, ‘Oh, no, no room for me, I’ll have to sleep with you , Lachlan,’ and laughed. They both seemed to think this was hilarious. It never seemed to occur to them that Lachlan could sleep on the couch and Effie and I could share a bed.

It was a weekend and they stayed in with the curtains closed and drank and smoked the whole time. I’d hoped that they might at least have taken me to the Castle. In the end I went out on my own, roamed around Edinburgh for hours and ended up getting lost. A policeman had to show me the way home. It was a shame he didn’t come in with me. I might have been taken away by a welfare officer and had a normal life. The flat was a wreck – bottles and ash-trays, dirty plates, even underwear. Lachlan had passed out on the couch and Effie could barely speak she was so drunk.

When I came home I found that Marjorie had died in the local cottage hospital and without a single living soul to see her off, the nurse by her bedside having slipped outside for a cigarette.

Lachlan, who had turned out in adulthood to be as vain, weak and selfish as his childhood character predicted, decided it was time he acquired a wife and got engaged to the highly strung daughter of a judge. Effie was furious, jealous as a cat, and immediately got married again herself to a man she met on a train. It was to spite Lachlan, I suppose. This new husband of Effie’s – let’s call him Edmund – was rich – he owned a business – war-profiteering of some kind, although Lachlan always referred to him as a car salesman because he’d offered to sell him his old Bentley ‘at a good price’.

Lachlan’s own wife, Gertrude, proved a disappointment. Chosen to be a brood mare for the Stuart-Murray blood, she turned out to be incapable of bearing children.

Donald had another stroke and became bedridden. Whenever I came home from school it was to the smell of the sick-room. The house was full of nurses coming and going, mainly going – Donald was a terrible patient, most of his nurses only stayed a few weeks; one only lasted a night after Donald threw a full urinal at her head.

Then Mabel Orchard came.

‘And?’

~ And everything.

Brian twirled his cane and his false moustache for Madame Astarti’s benefit.

‘Can you get my fags from the dressing-room?’ Sandra asked her. They were waiting in the wings (a place Madame Astarti felt she’d spent her whole life), waiting for their cue to go on stage and start sawing and vanishing.

There was something melancholic about an empty dressing-room, Madame Astarti thought, even threatening in a funny way. It reminded her of Stage Fright or clowns. Madame Astarti had always found clowns frightening. They were so . . . unfunny.

There was no sign of a packet of cigarettes anywhere, but there were clothes hanging on a rail and a coat on a hanger on the back of a door and Madame Astarti went through the pockets of all of them, gingerly, because you never knew what you would find in a strange pocket, but she found nothing. She tried the cupboard. The door handle was stiff and she had to pull hard on it. She nearly fell over backwards when it suddenly responded—