‘Was it like that?’ I ask her, as I have asked her many times before.
Nora looks at me thoughtfully.
~ Not exactly, she says.
I dreamt that one day Nora’s father – chastened and forgiving – would find me and claim me as granddaughter and heir, and I would be restored to my rightful place in a world where people stay in one place and sleep in their own beds at night and avoid unnecessary journeys. Of course, life is composed almost entirely of journeys, necessary and unnecessary, but mostly unnecessary in my opinion.
I am waiting for Nora to give myself to me, to tell me about the time before my memory began, before I myself began.
‘Perhaps you could start with Douglas,’ I prompt her.
~ Who?
‘Your brother.’
But she’s already gone, striding across the cliff-top towards the house.
My babysitting services were required because Philippa and Archie were going to a dinner party at the home of the Dean. When I arrived at their house in Windsor Place I found Archie standing at the kitchen sink, stoking up beforehand in case there might not be enough food and drink on offer at the Dean’s table – desperately quaffing the dregs of an old bottle of Bordeaux – a leftover from a French holiday en famille – between mouthfuls of a cold shepherd’s pie that he’d foraged from the depths of the fridge.
‘Politics,’ he said to me, ‘that’s the name of the game – Maggie Mackenzie hasn’t been invited, you’ll notice. Nor Dr Clever-Dick. And as for Grant Watson, or whatever his name is – what a no-hoper.’
‘What about the Professor?’
‘The who?’
Archie finished off the shepherd’s pie and started truffling around in the fridge again, finally retrieving a plate of leftover roast chicken and Brussels sprouts. I never ate anything from the McCues’ fridge when I was babysitting, there were things lurking in there that I recognized from two years ago – rancid dairy products and strange life forms blooming and reproducing in old Mason jars. Philippa, a Girton old girl and a part-time lecturer in the Philosophy department, was the slapdash sort and kept a remarkably filthy house.
Philippa had also recently become infected with the writing sickness and had embarked on her own novel – a doctor/nurse romance ( The Wards of Love ) in which the heroine bore the unlikely name of ‘Flick’ and which Philippa was intending to send to Mills & Boon. The large farmhouse table in the kitchen seemed to be acting as Philippa’s desk – it was littered with papers, unmarked essays and textbooks. Philippa’s surprisingly neat philosopher’s hand was much in evidence, particularly on a great sheaf of narrow-lined foolscap, the aguish aura of which suggested it must be her novel.
Words peeled off the page – hair the colour of a field of ripe wheat . . . eyes like drops from the bottomless depths of an azure ocean – and rained onto the Nairn cushion vinyl. The McCues’ dog, Duke, pattered into the kitchen. Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.
Duke sniffed around the floor looking for something to eat other than words; the kitchen floor usually rendered up any number of food deposits. Today there was a raw egg that someone had dropped and not bothered to clean up. Duke licked up the egg with one sweep of his tongue, skilfully avoiding the broken shell, and then sat down heavily as if his legs had given way and drooled at the chicken drumstick that Archie was gnawing on like a caveman.
Adding to the general air of disarray in the McCue household were a number of animals. In descending order of size after Duke these were: a hefty cat called Goneril; a Dutch rabbit (Dorothea); a guinea-pig (Bramwell); and, finally, a hamster called McFluffy who was replaced by a new McFluffy every few months whenever the old McFluffy was either eaten by Goneril, trodden on by Philippa or sat on by Duke (or vice versa). A considerable number of McFluffies had simply packed their pouches and escaped from prison, disappearing into the innards of the house, so that behind the wainscoting and under the floorboards there now lived a tribe of feral hamsters conducting guerrilla warfare against the McCue household.
The current McFluffy was sleeping in a nest of shredded Evening Telegraph s, in a cage in the corner of the kitchen. The cage was precariously balanced on top of a Christmas-sized tin of Quality Street, containing five years of unfiled household receipts, and a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling .