The Princess of Wales herself had been at Donald’s first wedding to Evangeline, held in London way back in the previous century, but only a duke could be mustered the second time round for the rather less flamboyant nuptials at St Giles’ in Edinburgh. Marjorie wore Evangeline’s diamonds but, like the new bride, they failed to sparkle under a miserable Edinburgh sky.
Donald set about replacing his lost children, first with a girl, Deirdre, who went to be Honoria’s playmate almost straight away, then a boy, Lachlan, followed swiftly by Effie and then, finally, fourteen long years later, the afterthought that was Eleanora—
‘You mean you? I think you should tell this in the first person.’
~ Why?
‘To make it more real.’
~ I would prefer it if it was less real.
Silence.
‘That’s it ?’ I call into the fog but receive no answer.
When I finally get back to the house Nora is boiling up a mishmash of something unpalatable in an old cloth.
~ Clootie dumpling, she says. Carry on, do.
Philippa was in the kitchen, stirring a vast vat of soup, a hotchpotch made from anything she’d been able to find, not all of it necessarily edible.
‘Everything but the kitchen sink,’ she laughed. The soup was thin and rancid-looking and smelt of rotten cabbage leaves, and something living seemed to be swimming around in it.
‘Taste?’ Philippa offered, holding up a ladle.
Philippa was wearing a pair of Archie’s trousers and a fisherman’s smock in a thick brown moleskin material, and had tied an Indian silk scarf, Apache-style, around her hair. She trawled for something in the pocket of her smock and netted a new and very sleepy McFluffy. After trying in vain to rouse it, she stuffed it back in her pocket. Somewhere in the depths of the house I could hear the sound of energetic hoovering.
I was sitting at one end of the McCues’ huge pine kitchen table sipping reluctantly at a cup of acrid coffee that Philippa had forced on me. Goneril, looking cross-eyed in the morning light, was slumped on an essay entitled, ‘ How can I tell whether what seems to be a memory of mine is in fact a genuine one? ’ She was washing herself indolently, every now and then dislodging little feathery dandelion tufts of feline fur that floated through the air. I watched one of them land delicately in the soup.
‘I think she’s got some kind of mange,’ Philippa said, chucking the cat under the chin.
The salmon, a little the worse for wear – indeed, only half of it now remained – occupied the centre of the table. It had been poached for the party and in an effort to restore it to life its silver-lamé skin had been replaced with cucumber slices and its dead eye with a stuffed olive. It wasn’t fully dressed; many of its cucumber scales had fallen off, revealing pink flesh underneath. Here and there a few flakes of skin still lingered like the scurf of stars. A row of cooked shrimp had been placed along its back, perhaps as a garnish, perhaps as a misguided attempt to recreate its spinal cord.
‘You didn’t come to our party,’ Philippa chided, throwing a huge handful of salt in the soup.
‘Sorry. I had to write an essay.’
It was cold in the Windsor Place kitchen, that horrible damp cold that makes you feel suddenly melancholy. All the windows were misted up from the soup-making and from the rack of wet laundry that was hanging over the radiator. I cast a cursory glance over the clothes, wondering if any of them belonged to Ferdinand, some intimate garment perhaps that had touched his skin, but all I caught a glimpse of was a pair of Archie’s huge, slightly grey Y-fronts and quickly looked away. No wonder all the McCues always smelt faintly of cooking. Except for Ferdinand, of course.
‘So, how’s Ferdinand?’ I asked Philippa, trying to sound off-hand.
‘Oh, you know Ferdinand?’ Philippa said. ‘How nice.’
The sound of the vacuuming grew more insistent until finally Mrs McCue hoovered herself into the room on the end of a Goblin cylinder. She was followed by Mrs Macbeth, who had slung a net bag from her walking-frame to act as a container for cleaning materials – a tin of Mansion House polish, a box of Flash, a large bottle of Parozone, a pink bottle of Windolene – things that had probably never seen the inside of the McCue house before. Bringing up the rear, Duke shouldered his way into the kitchen. I almost expected to see a feather duster in his mouth.
Mrs McCue hoovered noisily over the vinyl, picking up anything in her path – egg-shells and cabbage stalks, broken pencils, assorted grit, bushels of cat fur, the odd Brussels sprout. Finally, to my relief, she switched the machine off and said, ‘That’s enough for now.’
Sensing the need for an explanation, Philippa said, ‘Good old Ma’s doing some cleaning for me. And her friend, too, of course,’ she added.