Emotionally Weird(91)

Mrs McCue sniffed her tea suspiciously as if it might be laced with arsenic.

‘She thinks someone’s trying to kill her as well,’ I explained to Professor Cousins.

‘Well, you know what they say, don’t you?’ he said in a confidential voice to Mrs McCue.

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you?’ she said.

‘Exactly!’ he grinned.

Sheila Lake, smeared with oatmeal and masticated Farley’s rusks – and presumably with a baby hidden about her person somewhere – seemed rather charmed by Professor Cousins’ geisha qualities, complaining that Roger wouldn’t recognize the kettle if it hit him on the head (an attractive idea). She seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that her husband was planning to move his pregnant (or perhaps no longer pregnant) girlfriend into her sandstone villa in Barnhill.

‘No Kara?’ I asked. ‘No Olivia?’ No-one, in fact, who might take Proteus off my hands – Proteus who was currently asleep on the bed in the spare room, the erstwhile place of repose of Ferdinand and Janet. Janet herself was sleeping peacefully under the kitchen table downstairs, but what of Ferdinand, where was he?

‘He’s taken the dog for a walk,’ Philippa said. Duke gave her a questioning look. She frowned at him. ‘Not that dog, obviously,’ she said, ‘because that dog is here and we can’t ignore the evidence of our senses because then we would enter the territory of casuistry and unnatural doubt, which is all very well in its place. Of course, some people would argue that the truth of factual statements can only be established inductively from particular experiences. Can perceptions yield knowledge of a mind-independent world? Is such a world ever knowable? Does “being” consist in “being perceived”? Is a dog merely a collection of sense data – the smell of a dog, the sound of a dog, the feel of a dog, the taste of a dog, et cetera?’ Philippa paused and, returning Duke’s scrutinizing gaze, said rather lamely, ‘Another dog, Ferdinand’s taken another dog for a walk.’

‘The taste of a dog?’ Mrs Macbeth puzzled.

The McCue kitchen contained two of the things Andrea feared most in life – food and old people – a fact that was making her rather pale and fidgety. She reported being dragooned by Heather to attend this meeting after being lectured on the ethics of eating an egg from the shared fridge, which she claimed she hadn’t even touched – an egg which was marked ‘H’ in black felt-tip pen, ‘Like Humpty-Dumpty,’ Andrea said moodily. She was wearing a smocked and ruffled pinafore that would not have looked out of place on a Victorian child.

‘I thought property was theft?’ I said to Heather.

‘Property’s property,’ she retorted crossly.

‘What does that mean?’ I said, irritated by this tautologous wisdom, ‘like “I’m me”, or “a door is a door”, “a cat’s a cat”?’

‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ Mrs Macbeth said.

‘Is this a game?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully.

Mrs McCue was buttering Selkirk bannock. Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth had been busy baking in Philippa’s kitchen all morning although, as Mrs McCue confided rather loudly in my ear, not before they had scrubbed everything clean of the McCues’ resident germs.

‘Bannock, anyone?’ Mrs McCue offered, handing round a plate.

‘I thought that was a battle,’ Andrea said, frowning at the huge slab of calories being thrust under her nose.

‘I’m awfie fond of a wee bittie bannock myself,’ Mrs Macbeth said conversationally to no-one in particular. She was wearing a wrap-over overall and was lightly dusted with a talcum of flour.

‘Oh, me too,’ Professor Cousins said enthusiastically. ‘I can’t think of anything better than tucking into a spread prepared by the deft hands of the fairer sex.’

‘Come again?’ Heather said waspishly, her face distorting unattractively with disbelief.

‘I said,’ Professor Cousins began again pleasantly—

‘I heard what you said,’ Heather said rudely. ‘I just couldn’t believe you said it.’

‘Shouldn’t you be at the barricades or something?’ I said to her.

‘There’s no difference between the fight for feminism and the fight for socialism,’ she said, inadvertently eating a piece of Irish tea-loaf that Mrs McCue had just buttered. A raisin lodged unattractively between Heather’s front teeth but I chose not to tell her about it.

Andrea meanwhile nibbled delicately on a slice of Border tart, looking rather faint, while Mrs Macbeth urged a flapjack on her.