Frank was indifferent to the woman walking out of the water, instead he was screaming at what he had found inside his stall. Where his plaice and haddock and tubs of whelks were usually displayed was an altogether more sinister cold water fish – the body of a dead woman lay on the slab, with a lemon stuck in her mouth and a few sprigs of parsley for garnish.
~ Mabel Orchard was thirty-four years old when she arrived in the glen to nurse Donald and was as passive as a piece of furniture and as placid as a bowling-green.
(How fanciful are my mother-not-my-mother’s figures of speech.)
Mabel was very religious; she claimed she’d had visions as a child, something which hadn’t gone down very well with the strict and obscure Christian sect that her parents were members of, who branded her a fanciful and heretical child, one teetering dangerously on the brink of papism and idolatry. Now Mabel no longer bothered with the edifices and ritual of the Church but claimed, like Joan of Arc before her, that God spoke to her in person all the time, although sometimes he sent his Son to have a word and very occasionally she was blessed with a tête-à-tête with the Holy Ghost Himself. Like Joan of Arc, she was also engaged in a one-woman battle with the enemy, but in the case of Mabel it was the forces of Satan rather than the English (which is not the same thing, despite what some may say).
Mabel was herself English, born in Bristol to a family that, despite its earthbound name, had been seafaring for centuries, manning men-o’-wars, submersing in submarines and ferrying cargoes of slaves across the great wide ocean. The last male in the Orchard line – Mabel’s brother – had been torpedoed on the China Seas and there was a general sense of disappointment in the family that the nautical genes were going to die out with Mabel, who had decided to remain as chaste as a nun.
Although she had spent her whole childhood wishing for children of her own, Mabel had forsaken personal happiness and all thought of marriage and married love after her fiancé – Dudley – was shot through the heart at Tobruk, this in spite of the little Bible Mabel had given him as a parting gift and which had nestled snugly in the pocket of his uniform waiting to catch bullets and save his life – in the manner of a story she had read in a magazine. After it fatally failed to fulfil this function, Mabel was uncertain as to whether she should stop believing in God or in fiction. She chose the latter and never opened a magazine – or even a newspaper – from that day forward. After Dudley died Mabel trained as a nurse. If he had lived she had planned to fill her arms with so many babies that when they grew up there would be enough Orchards to crew the entire British naval fleet if necessary.
Mabel wore a plain gold crucifix around her neck, given to her by Dudley on his last leave, and the chain was so thin that it was beginning to disappear into the folds and rolls of flesh around her chin. For Mabel was fat. There was no politer word for it. Her personal God put no restrictions on appetite or intake, indeed, Mabel had a feeling that he actively encouraged her to eat. And her body, she reasoned, was made by Him, so what better way to praise His works than to develop more of it. It was God, after all, who had put all this bounty on earth – even lardy cakes and black bun – who was she to shun it? Lachlan, when he first met her, called her ‘the cow’ and she did possess a strange passing resemblance to a Jersey in the colour of her hair, the length of her lashes, the flesh on her ample fallow flank. Yet she was stately, almost majestic, in her bulk – more like a great tribal queen than a milch-cow and when she ate – which was often – she was as delicate as a cat.
‘Well-upholstered,’ mumbled Donald – who still had the power of speech, if little else, and had taken an uncharacteristic ‘shine’ to his new caretaker. Mabel was so relentlessly nice to him with her ‘God bless you’s and ‘Jesus loves you’s that he began to believe this propaganda and the idea that God might still love him, despite his flaws, wrought a strange change in his character and made him almost bearable. And, although now in his seventies, Donald was still capable of appreciating a female bosom and took considerable, albeit heathen, pleasure in trying to catch sight of Mabel’s butterfat breasts through her cheap blouses, as she bent over him to attend to some intimate bodily function or other of his.
Unfortunately for Donald, he was now paralysed down his left side and could not really put his thoughts into action.
Such servants as there were had now all departed. They had either been driven away by Donald (before he was blessed by God) or they had got tired of not receiving any wages (the Stuart-Murrays had always had a tendency to resent the idea that servants were supposed to be paid), and Mabel cheerfully took on all the work of the house. Her big dumpling-fleshed arms washed and wrung out any number of soiled bedsheets and stained clothes; she swept and scrubbed and shined and even found time to cook the kind of hearty food that her mother had cooked for her when she lived at home – suet puddings, boiled brisket and shin-beef stews, rissoles and scrag-end hot-pots, jam roly-poly and bread-and-butter pudding. Donald discovered that he rather liked this food and wished he’d met Mabel when he was younger; she would have surely have produced more wholesome and longer-lived heirs than either Evangeline or Marjorie had managed (although Evangeline could hardly be blamed for the First World War).