I found Maisie in the living-room watching a Monty Python re-run. I retrieved a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut from my bag and broke it into two and shared it with her. It covered several of the major food groups and hadn’t been contaminated by the McCues’ kitchen.
‘Thanks,’ she said, cramming most of the chocolate into her mouth at once. Nine-year-old Maisie was the most normal of the McCues (in some ways anyway). She was a plain girl, with straight hair and thin limbs and a mathematical turn of mind. Photographs of a newlaid Maisie in the overheated maternity ward of the DRI, showed her lying in a plastic cot like lidless Tupperware, looking like a small, skinned mammal, apart from a little thatch of mouse hair on her head. Even at six hours old, she seemed unaccountably old.
Maisie’s full name was Maisie Ophelia. I can’t help but think that it’s an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn’t bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it’s true they are much harder to find. (‘Ratty’ and ‘Mole’ are Maisie’s suggestions.)
‘Do you have homework?’ I asked her.
‘Not really,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the television.
‘I do,’ I said gloomily, taking George Eliot out of my bag. I commenced to write very slowly – James’s judgement that Middlemarch is an ‘indifferent whole’ is refuted by even a superficial reading of the novel, when we cannot help but be struck by the highly wrought nature of the writing, the function of character, the careful thematic structuring and the balancing and illusion of autogenesis, something for which the paralleling of action and moral consequence – but then I must have fallen asleep again because the next thing I knew I was being rudely awoken by a scream and it was a little while before I understood that the scream had come from the television set, rather than one of the various inhabitants of the house.
Maisie was deeply engrossed in a black-and-white horror film of some kind. The woman who was screaming – tall and blond with her hair in a perfect French pleat and apparently called Irma – seemed to have realized (rather late in the day) that she had stopped for the night at a bed and breakfast run by a vampire, even though you would have thought, as B and B names go, ‘Castle Vlad’ wasn’t exactly ‘Sea View’ or ‘The Pines’.
‘She’s really thick,’ Maisie said admiringly.
I tried to shift position; I was incredibly uncomfortable – Duke was slumped heavily on my feet while curled up in my lap, like a large evil netsuke, was Goneril. Not only that, but Maisie’s bony body was sticking into me on one side, while on my other side, an old woman I had never seen before was fast asleep, her head lolling uncomfortably on my shoulder.
The old woman had skin that was the texture and colour of white marshmallows and in a poor light (which was always) you might have mistaken her hair for a cloud of slightly rotten candyfloss. Although fast asleep, she was still clutching a pair of knitting needles on which hung a strange shapeless thing, like a web woven by a spider on drugs. She looked so peaceful it seemed a shame to wake her up.
‘Maisie?’ I said quietly.
‘Mm?’
‘There’s an old woman on the sofa with us.’
Maisie tore her eyes away from the television to lean over and look and said, ‘It’s just Granny.’
‘Granny?’
‘My dad’s mum.’ (How strangely complicated that sounded.)
Surely she was supposed to be in The Anchorage in Newport-on-Tay, looking at the water?
‘She escaped,’ Maisie said.
Now that I looked at her I could see that Mrs McCue looked vaguely familiar. Despite Andrea’s belief that ‘all old people look alike’ I thought I recognized her from the shoal of mourners at ‘Senga’s’ funeral that afternoon. Mrs McCue woke up and automatically began to knit. After a while she stopped and sighed and, looking at me with yellowing rheumy eyes, said wistfully, ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’ She seemed to be altogether from the jaundiced end of the spectrum – the whites of her eyes were the colour of Milky Bars and her horsy teeth resembled blank Scrabble tiles.
It seemed churlish not to comply with her heartfelt request and so I levered Duke off my feet – no easy task – shoogled Goneril off my knee as gently as I could to avoid being bitten, and finally struggled free of the bookending bodies of Maisie and the dowager Mrs McCue, who both immediately shifted to fill the space I’d vacated.