The party looked dire, although I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a good party. Perhaps there is a perfect form of merriment somewhere but what its constituents are I do not know and cannot imagine.
~ Fireworks, Nora says dreamily, and Chinese lanterns strung in trees and the moon reflected in the water.
I could see Philippa trying to encourage the Dean to dance. She was bouncing around in a tent-like dress, patterned in psychedelic swirls of purple and brown. The Dean was trying to pretend he was somewhere else – the Caird Hall perhaps, listening to the SNO in concert, or, preferably, lying in his bed fast asleep next to the flanneletted body of his wife, a large matronly woman called Gerda, currently in rayon and being propositioned by a swaying Archie.
A different tableau-vivant could be observed in the adjacent window, which looked into the dining-room. I could see Professor Cousins daintily sipping sherry while talking to Martha Sewell, who was wearing sober black. In the background I could just make out Dr Dick having a furious fight with Maggie Mackenzie.
‘Why are we here?’ I asked Chick.
He shrugged. ‘Who knows.’
‘No, I mean, why are we here ?’
‘Why not?’ How annoying Chick was. How strangely Bobbish. When I informed him that I was supposed to be at the McCue party he tried to shoo me out of the car and into the house (to see if anything fishy was occurring, naturally). I steadfastly refused, even though I could see that there was much material for narrative there – the drunken faux pas , the misaligned relationships, the forbidden sex, even plot advancement – but none of that was enough to tempt me inside.
A woman appeared at the dining-room window, a glass of red wine in her hand. She gazed into the street, an abstracted expression on her face. For a moment I couldn’t place her because she was so out of context and then I suddenly recognized her – it was the Hillman Imp woman, the woman we had been watching in Fife.
‘It’s the Hillman Imp woman,’ I hissed at Chick and he said, ‘I know,’ from behind his Evening Telegraph .
‘What’s she doing here?’ I said to him. ‘I don’t understand.’
I watched her move away from the window. The next moment she reappeared in the neighbouring room and walked up to Watson Grant. He paused in his inept dancing and lurched drunkenly towards her, pulled her into his arms and started kissing her neck – an unattractive activity that she endured with rather a long-suffering expression on her face.
‘So she is having an affair,’ I said, ‘there’s your proof. She’s having an affair with Grant Watson. You should photograph them or something.’
‘Nah,’ Chick said, dragging hard on an Embassy, ‘that’s his wife.’
Chez Bob
UNBELIEVABLY, IT WAS ONLY EIGHT O’CLOCK WHEN I got home. I ate Cornish Wafers and Philadelphia cream cheese; I watched the news, although I turned it off when it showed trees being napalmed. I read Me and Miss Mandible and listened to After the Gold Rush ; I washed out a pair of tights and sewed on a button. I ate more Cornish Wafers, but I had run out of Philadelphia. I wrote a halfhearted sentence of Henry James ( James’s implication is not only that the novel is episodic and fragmented but also that it is a vehicle for far too much analytic and philosophical intrusion on the part of the author herself –) until finally I went to bed only to be woken a couple of hours later by Shug and Bob rolling in with a couple of traffic cones and a clutch of warm rolls from Cuthbert’s all-night bakery. Of my mysterious promised visitor there had been no sign at all.
~ Have you guessed who she is yet? I ask Nora, who is chewing on a Jacob’s cream cracker from a packet she’s found in a tin at the back of a cupboard. I can smell its staleness. Nora has coiled her hair up in a careless heap and I can see fiery little tendrils curling at her neck. Today our hair is very red on account of the rain that is threatening us. For we live in a raincloud. Nora says she can feel the rheumaticky weather in her bones. She says she is a human barometer.
‘Do you recognize her?’
~ Do you think that’s a weevil? she asks, staring at the cream cracker.
Bob and Shug started playing a relentless, noisy game of Diplomacy until, overcome by an attack of the munchies, they went out into the darkness on a quest for Mars Bars. The clock by the bed said six o’clock. I wondered if it was morning or night. It didn’t make any difference, I was wide awake anyway. There seemed to be nothing for it but to write.
Madame Astarti took an early lunch, ambling out to buy fish and chips from a little place down a side street called ‘The Catch Of The Day’. It was off the tourist track and much frequented by the locals. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned kind of place with tiled pictures of fish and a back room with a coal fire. It took a minute or two for Madame Astarti to notice that it was no longer the chip shop it had been, but was now called ‘The Codfather’ and had been fitted out in stainless steel and pale blue plastic.