‘Go on.’
~ The summer holidays before my final year at school. I spent most of my time studying, I was hoping to go to Edinburgh University to read science.
‘Really?’
I’ve never thought of Nora as having a scientific kind of mind, never think of her having any left-brain at all.
~ Yes, really, she says. I remember that it did nothing but rain that summer. That was nothing unusual, of course, but it was so warm as well and often the air had a heavy, tropical feel to it as if we were in the middle of some great climatic change. It was the strangest weather – purple, stormladen skies, air humming with static. I saw hornets for the first time, droning through the air as if they could hardly lift their own weight. And we were plagued all summer by wasps, one bike after another turning up, under the eaves, in the attics, in the lilacs overhanging the lawn. Mabel bought cyanide to poison them but apparently she’d bought the wrong kind – powder instead of gas – and we didn’t get rid of the wasps until the first frost of winter.
Then Effie came to stay, trying to avoid the sordid details of the divorce courts and the relentless pursuit of a Daily Express reporter intent on a photograph to reveal the face of the notorious co-respondent to the public. Apparently, the divorce courts had been shown photographs of every part of her anatomy except her face.
Effie was continually loathsome the whole time, hanging about the house, listless and bored, muttering vile things about Mabel – her size, the common food she cooked, her dubious morals. Mabel smiled at Effie and told her God loved her.
‘No he fucking doesn’t,’ she spat back. Effie was convinced Mabel was nothing more than a gold-digger and was terrified that she was going to lose whatever inheritance was left (which was very little and mostly composed of Evangeline’s diamonds, which Mabel had never worn), and although she hated sick-rooms she spent a lot of time sitting by Donald’s bed trying to find out details of his will.
She considered her father to be completely ‘ga-ga’ and had consulted her solicitor – Effie spent half her time with solicitors now – about getting the marriage declared null and void. I kept out of her way, she never had a good word for me. ‘Every time I look at you,’ she said, ‘I see myself getting older.’
Effie spent a lot of time on the telephone to Lachlan, who was still living in Edinburgh, trying to persuade him to visit, which he did eventually, in August. He brought his neurasthenic wife, the judge’s barren daughter—
‘Oh, give her a name, for heaven’s sake.’
~ Sure?
‘Yes.’
~ Pamela.
‘Thank you.’
~ His neurasthenic wife, Pamela, city born and bred and highly averse to the country. Pamela took to her bed almost immediately, complaining of headaches and humidity. Mabel spent her time ferrying iced tea and aspirin and arrowroot biscuits up the stairs and reassuring Pamela that despite all signs to the contrary, God loved her very much. An ungrateful Pamela complained that Mabel smelt of bacon fat, which wasn’t true – she smelt of Yardley’s freesia talcum powder and jam, for it was jam-making season and Mabel spent hours at a time stirring the boiling fruit and sugar in Woodhaven’s old copper jeely-pans that she had burnished up again with lemon juice and elbow grease. Jam-making was a dangerous activity because of the plague of wasps, so that before she began her task Mabel had to seal up the kitchen windows and warn no-one to trespass over the threshold of the kitchen.
She must have been making the jam for herself, for no more than two pots a year were consumed in that house. Effie was too bitter to have a sweet tooth and Donald certainly didn’t eat any jam, he was now living off sops and milk soup. He had recently begun to suffer dreadful pains in his stomach. The local doctor, who was surprised Donald was still alive anyway – a fact that was probably due to Mabel’s careful nursing – guessed at ulcers and prescribed Milk of Magnesia.
Lachlan and Effie spent all their time together, usually out of the house, driving or walking in the hills, sometimes swimming in the loch, in the rain, always plotting how to get rid of Mabel. Mabel herself was serenely indifferent to them, humming happily to herself as she went about her lowly tasks. She seemed like a woman keeping a secret to herself, and I was surprised that Effie – who had so many secrets of her own – didn’t try to prise it out of her.
The whole week that Effie and Lachlan were visiting, the short summer nights were rent by Donald’s roars of pain, nights already disturbed by the beastly moans of the cattle, newly deprived of their little calves, and the bleating of the sheep torn from their lambs.