‘I like to bake,’ she said. ‘I like to keep my hand in. Or hands in,’ she added, looking down at one of her own midget hands, but then she seemed to grow suddenly confused and hobbled away, patting Andrea’s shoulder affectionately as she passed her. Andrea gave a little shudder.
‘It’s not contagious,’ I reassured her. ‘It’s not like leprosy, you can’t catch old age by touching them.’
‘She seems so very small ,’ Andrea whispered to me, nodding in the direction of Mrs Macbeth’s retreating back. ‘Was she small to begin with? Or do we all end up like that?’
‘What?’ Mrs McCue said. ‘It’s rude to whisper, you know.’
‘I said,’ Andrea said more loudly, ‘that she seems very small.’
‘Who? Who seems very small?’ Philippa asked.
‘That . . . small woman,’ Andrea said helplessly, for Mrs Macbeth was now out of sight.
‘She means Mrs Macbeth,’ Mrs McCue said, buttering everything she could get her hands on.
‘Mrs Macbeth?’ Andrea repeated doubtfully.
‘It’s a perfectly good name,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘People are called it.’
‘Well, they’re not called “ it ”,’ Professor Cousins said and laughed.
‘Look,’ Heather said crossly, ‘this isn’t the WI; we’re supposed to be having a serious meeting about wages for housework.’
Mrs McCue took out a familiar piece of knitting and frowned. ‘Wages for housework? But who would pay them?’
‘The wages of sin,’ Professor Cousins said vaguely. ‘You don’t seem to have a hot-water jug,’ he added to Philippa.
‘What would I want a hot-water jug for?’ she puzzled.
‘For hot water, of course,’ Mrs McCue said. Before this conversation could carry on (‘What would I want hot water for?’ et cetera), Maisie burst into the kitchen, Lucy Lake trailing on her heels.
‘Hello, Emily,’ Sheila said carelessly, when she saw Lucy.
‘Lucy,’ Lucy corrected her. Sheila peered at her eldest more closely and still didn’t seem convinced.
‘Salmon sandwich?’ Philippa coaxed, pushing the plate towards Lucy and Maisie. No-one had so far touched one. Mrs Macbeth wandered back into the room and looked startled, as if she had been expecting to enter a quite different room in a quite different house (and perhaps at a quite different point in the century).
Professor Cousins cranked his skinny cat hams up from his chair and pulled another one out for Mrs Macbeth and said, ‘Do take a seat, Mrs Macbeth,’ so that Heather looked fit to explode at this further affront to her egalitarian sensibilities.
The sight of Maisie reminded me that the last time I saw her I had recklessly abandoned her to Chick’s dubious guardianship.
‘You got home all right then last night?’ I asked her.
She rolled her eyes (‘Oh, don’t,’ Professor Cousins said faintly). ‘It depends what you mean by “all right”,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of bannock.
‘She was late, I know that,’ Philippa said.
‘I had recorder practice,’ Maisie lied artlessly, but then a muffled squealing noise announced that Proteus had woken up. I hoped he hadn’t fallen off the bed.
I had moved Archie’s manuscript from beneath the guest bed before putting Proteus down. He was too young to be exposed to the corrupting influence of J and his cohorts. The latest chapter to be added was particularly nasty. J – or J’s doppelgänger, for he appeared to have acquired at least one recently – was being tortured by a particularly sadistic woman wearing nothing but high-heeled leather boots. More bizarrely still, The Expanding Prism of J had been joined in the spare room by The Wards of Love , like a matching pair of His ’n’ Hers imaginations. I dreaded to think what would happen if the two got mixed up. Before she knew where she was, Flick would be wearing Avengers boots and running up and down endless stairs in European apartment blocks being chased by the vile beasts of the imagination (Paranoia and Melancholia).
I changed Proteus’s nappy, bundling him anyhow into the awkward terry square but pinning it very cautiously in case I pierced his fragile baby flesh. I wondered what I was going to do when I came to the end of Olivia’s supply of nappies. Perhaps I’d have to start washing them. (What a thought.) I jiggled Proteus around on my hip for a while and showed him the view from the window. He held out one fat arm and tried to catch a seagull flying low. Today the Tay was the colour of infinity and made me feel suddenly depressed. Nothing good ever seemed to happen to me. And I was stuck with a madwoman with the same name as me stalking me, and someone else’s baby and Bob for a boyfriend and some horrible virus that had got into my blood and was taking over my body like the alien being that it was.