Emotionally Weird(21)

~ Did I miss anything? she asks.

‘A certain amount of fear and loathing, a little paranoia, acres of boredom, the Lady Agaruitha in a tower. A lot of new characters that you’ll just have to catch up with as best as you can.’

~ No dragons?

‘Not yet.’

Nora has sea-change eyes. Today they are a murky rock-pool brown because the gulls are being chased inland by a determined south-westerly. The wind on the cliffs is so strong that sometimes we find ourselves walking backwards.

I am strangely at home in this salty air, I am in my element.

~ The sea’s in your blood, Nora says, the call of the sea.

Did the Stuart-Murrays – luckless landlubbers who farmed the rolled and folded landscape of Perthshire – have the salty, seagoing blood of sailors?

~ Quite the opposite, says Nora.

For it seems that the Stuart-Murrays, whilst mysteriously drawn to the water – witness our ancestral holiday home, or Nora’s peregrinations – are nonetheless incapable of keeping afloat on it. There was a Stuart-Murray sank at Trafalgar, according to Nora, and one aboard the Mary Rose , one outward bound on the Titanic , one homeward bound on the Lusitania , and one long forgotten Stuart-Murray who is said to have lost the king’s treasure in the Forth, although which king and which treasure seems unclear.

I am surprised that Nora ever ventures out in her little Sea-Adventure . But it seems the Stuart-Murrays do not even have to be in boats to be drowned at sea, one of Nora’s uncles was believed lost in the great and horrible Tay Bridge disaster, sneaking onto the train at Wormit, the last stop before the bridge, in a fit of youthful high spirits and alcohol. Ticketless, he remained unaccounted for in the lists of the dead.

~ Not your blood in particular, she says, it’s in everyone’s blood, where else does the salt come from?

Nora is watching the sea, through a huge pair of First World War binoculars that she is toting. She says they once belonged to her eldest brother. A brother? She has never mentioned a brother.

~ Oh yes, Nora says nonchalantly, she had a lot of brothers and sisters.

‘Imaginary ones perhaps?’

~ Real, she says, and counts on her fingers, Douglas, Torquil, Murdo, Honoria, Elspeth . . . and those are just the ones who died before she was born. What an unlucky family the Stuart-Murrays seem to be.

~ Oh, that’s nothing, Nora says glumly, not compared with what happened later.





There Are Places Between Edinburgh and Dundee





I HAVE A STONE HOT - WATER BOTTLE , WRAPPED IN AN OLD SWEATER , that I hug to my body in a vain effort to keep warm at nights. It is difficult to sleep when the darkness is so absolute, the only illumination provided by the occasional chink of starlight or a faint moonbeam.

I remember the countless nights of my childhood during which Nora left me alone while she went to her work in some pub or hotel that had taken her on for the season. I can conjure her up now, smell her cheap lily-of-the-valley cologne as she bent to kiss me goodnight, her extravagant hair piled on top of her head like a seafront ice-cream and her figure sculpted by her barmaid’s dress or baffled by a severe waitress habit. I can still hear her whispering in my ear, entreating me to be a good girl – not to get out of bed, not to play with matches, not to choke on sweets, to scream if I was attacked by a stranger or a strangler or a rapist climbing in through the bedroom window. Nora always feared the worst.

~ From experience, she says darkly.

We drifted on, in and out with the tide, like flotsam, spending our time departing and arriving (or arriving and departing, depending on how you look at it). I grew up a connoisseur of pavilions and winter gardens and miniature golf courses. I may have been mystified by the conjugation of foreign verbs and the complex lives of fractions but I always knew my tide-tables. Nora’s talents (piano, French, Scottish country dancing) qualified her for nothing useful, but she never had trouble finding work in some Sailor’s Rest pub or Crow’s Nest café.

Nora usually lived in wherever she was working so that ‘home’ was some cold hotel attic or a ramshackle room over a public bar where the two of us slept in rooms where the smell of mass catering and stale beer seeped up through the floorboards to join the aroma of wet hand-washed laundry drying dangerously on an Ascot water heater. We lived off other people’s leftovers – salted nuts and olives and maraschino cherries from gin palaces and lounge bars, or restaurant scrapings – wedding trifle from the bottom of catering bowls and stale canapés from dinner-dances. And endless fish and chips, eaten in vinegary haste straight from the newspaper before Nora rushed to work.

No wonder, therefore, that wherever we went I sought out friends with families of a larger and more conventional composition – girls who lived in ordinary houses (thirties semi-detached, good-sized garden), had a stay-at-home, homespun mother, a known father (an accountant, a grocer), at least one sibling, a grandmother, a dog, an aunt or two. Families who spent their lives boiling kettles, flushing toilets, answering phones (ad infinitum, ad nauseam).