Emotionally Weird(57)

‘The dog you were with this afternoon,’ Terri said without preamble to her, ‘where is he now?’

Miranda, who looked as though she was mainlining intravenous Valium, said, ‘What dog?’

‘The dog that was following you.’

‘There was a dog following me?’ Miranda said. ‘Why?’ Terri’s interrogation of Miranda petered out eventually but not until she had completely exhausted every possibility on the Miranda/yellow dog axis: (‘Maybe he’s on your bed and you just haven’t noticed?’ ‘Maybe you’ve hidden him in your wardrobe because you don’t want anyone to see him?’ and so on). If Miranda had had more energy – she looked as asthenic as a vampire’s victim – I think she would have punched Terri.

She reluctantly offered us something to drink and Terri chose coffee which turned out to be made of oats or barley, or maybe beans, and she gagged impolitely on it. I didn’t fare much better with the tea Miranda had stewing on the hob of the Aga; the tea leaves were like iron filings and the milk in it was rank with the taste of goat.

Gilbert reappeared, sans Bob, but accompanied by Kevin who had materialized out of nowhere. I was surprised to see Kevin who, despite being born and bred in the countryside, was immune to its pastoral charms (‘Green, green, green – what’s the point?’). He was wearing a short brown anorak that looked as if it was left over from his trainspotting days.

Miranda had grown bored with her task now and abandoned the Aga to Gilbert’s ministrations. She shrugged on a white coat and said, ‘Obs and Gynie,’ by way of explanation.

‘Don’t forget you’re killing the goat tonight,’ Gilbert reminded her in his terrifically posh accent as she went out the door.

‘Why does it have to be me?’ she asked sullenly.

‘Because,’ Gilbert said reasonably, ‘you’re the doctor.’

The occupants of Balniddrie took turns in cooking (although Miranda was generally excused as there was a paranoid house rumour that she was overly interested in toxicology), and today was Gilbert’s day apparently.

‘At home the servants do all the cooking,’ he said, ‘so this is terrific fun.’ He opened one of the doors of the Aga to reveal a loaf of heavy dark bread proving lopsidedly. He took out a large pottery bowl and removed the rather dirty tea-towel that was covering it. ‘Yoghurt,’ he announced as if he was introducing it to us. The yoghurt smelt even more goatish than the milk and had separated into gelatinous curds and a thin wershy whey.

‘Do you think that’s what it’s supposed to be like?’ he asked Terri, who almost fell off her chair in surprise as no-one had ever previously thought to ask her a question about cooking (or indeed about anything). Rather gratified, she did her best. ‘Try jam,’ she said.

‘What a fantastic idea,’ Gilbert said, retrieving a jar of jam from a damp and mouldering pantry that I never wanted to see the insides of. The jam was elderberry and had retained a lot of the little twiggy stalks. It also contrived, strangely for jam, to be sour. He stirred it enthusiastically into the yoghurt.

‘I’ve got more yoghurt somewhere,’ he said, yanking open another of the Aga’s doors and finding, to his surprise, a pile of (we must hope) clean nappies.

‘They’re airing,’ Kara said, appearing in the doorway, her body sagging with the weight of Proteus on her hip.

‘Well, I didn’t think they were cooking,’ he murmured, but not so that she could hear. Gilbert’s childhood nanny had inculcated a dreadful fear of women into him, a fear that Harrow had refined into an art.

Kara sat down at the kitchen table and started breast-feeding Proteus, currently encased in a grubby Babygro. She was followed into the kitchen by another of Balniddrie’s residents, a woman called—

~ For heaven’s sake, Nora objects grumpily, not another character. There are far too many already, and all these minor ones, what’s the point? You introduce them, give them a trace of character and then abandon them.

‘Who? Who have I done that to?’ I can see she’s having to rack her brain to come up with one but finally she says,

~ Davina.

‘Who?’

~ In the creative writing class. I bet she doesn’t appear again.

‘How much?’

~ A pound.

‘Anyway, life’s full of minor characters – milkmen, newsagents, taxi drivers. Can I go on?’

~ And what about the boy with no name?

‘No,’ I correct her, ‘it’s The Boy With No Name.’

~ Whatever, I don’t even see the point of introducing him – someone who doesn’t even exist any more. You would be as best not giving any of them names, they last for such a short time.