Emotionally Weird(14)
Professor Cousins startled me by leaning over towards me again and producing a Nuttall’s Minto from his pocket which he pressed into my hand, saying, ‘You’re a good girl,’ as if he had been told otherwise by someone.
I wondered if Professor Cousins was as old as he looked. I was a kind of magnet to old people – at bus-stops and in shop queues they flocked around me, desperate to chat about bus timetables and weather. Andrea, who was frightened of old people (in case she became one, one day, I suppose), said that every time she looked at a baby she thought that one day that baby would be an old person. Personally, I prefer to look at an old person and remember they were once someone’s baby. Perhaps there are two personality types (a half-full, half-empty kind of thing), on the one hand the people who can discern traces of the baby in the senescent and, on the other hand, the depressives that look at the fresh baby and see the demented old crone.
~ Wise, Nora amends, wise old crone.
Archie was beginning to get a slightly mad look in his eye. The overheated room and the number of people in it were making him increasingly dishevelled – he had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar and the damp patches of sweat were spreading further and further across his chest like two oceans determined on confluence.
‘ . . . or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified . . . ’
‘Excuse me, Archie,’ Professor Cousins was waving his hand around in the air to catch Archie’s eye.
‘Yes?’ Archie said stoically.
‘Could you just go back a bit,’ Professor Cousins said genially. ‘I seem to be losing the thread of all this. I’m afraid –’ he turned to Archie’s students with a conspiratorial smile – ‘I’m afraid I don’t have Dr McCue’s brilliant mind.’
Archie trundled his chair across the carpet, a mode of locomotion that made him resemble a particularly inept Dalek, but then stopped abruptly in front of the Professor and started doing strange breathing exercises, presumably to calm himself down, although he gave the impression of someone who was trying to inflate himself.
‘Realism,’ Martha intervened patiently on Archie’s behalf, speaking very loudly and slowly to Professor Cousins, ‘Dr McCue’s talking about realism.’
‘Ah,’ Professor Cousins smiled at Martha, ‘Trollope!’
Archie retreated back across the brown contract carpeting and snapped, ‘ The mimetic form can no longer convince us of its validity in the post-industrial age, true or false? Someone? Anyone? Kevin?’
Kevin shook his head miserably at the wall.
‘Effie?’
‘Well, I suppose these days,’ I said, wriggling uncomfortably in my chair, ‘there’s an epistemological shift in fiction-writing, whereby second-order verisimilitude won’t suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world.’ I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but Archie seemed to.
‘That seems to imply that achieving a transcendentally coherent view of the world might still be a good thing, doesn’t it? Anybody?’ There was another knock on the door.
‘It’s like Waterloo Station in here,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘I don’t know when you get any teaching done, Archie.’ Archie gave him a doubtful look. Professor Cousins may be on his way out but he hadn’t gone yet and still had hiring and firing power. The knock on the door was repeated.
‘Come in,’ Archie said querulously. The candle wavered and flickered wildly.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said to—
~No, no, enough, Nora says wearily, that’s far too many people already.
I sleep in a back room, a servant’s room, that smells of mildew and wet soot. The thin paisley eiderdown feels damp to the touch. I have settled on this room because the larger bedrooms all have water coming in the roof, collecting drip-drip-drip into buckets like Scottish water torture. I have tried to build a fire in the tiny cast-iron corner grate but the chimney is blocked, most likely by a dead bird.
On the bedside table there still sits a pocket Bible covered in cheap black leather that has blistered with the damp. The pages are freckled with age, the paper as thin as old skin. It is not a family Bible but is inscribed on the flyleaf in the utility hand of a servant. I imagine some poor put-upon maid of the holidaying Stuart-Murrays waking in the morning here to the sound of the thrumming rain and looking out across the dreich wet view from her little window and wishing she belonged to a sensible family that spent their summers in Deauville or Capri.
I can hardly sleep because of the unearthly yawling and yowling of the feral cats, like feline banshees. They have startled me awake most nights since I arrived – dropped off by a passing friendly fishing-boat, the owner of which regretted that he could not return for me because the island was full of strange noises that made him ‘feart’. He was not to be persuaded that they were merely Siamese cats gone horribly wrong.