Emotionally Weird Read online

  Evangeline soon fell pregnant and bravely gave birth every two years from then on until the end of the first decade of her marriage to Donald. Altogether they had five children, three boys (Douglas, Torquil and Murdo) followed by two girls. The first of these, Honoria, was dropped on her head from an upstairs window in the house in Eaton Square by a nursemaid who was later certified insane. Honoria was not exactly dead but neither was she exactly alive and after several months of dedicated nursing by her mother, Honoria finally gave up the struggle and died.

  The second girl, Elspeth, followed her shortly afterwards, succumbing to an epidemic of diphtheria when she was one year old.

  ‘As if,’ Evangeline said, ‘little Honoria just couldn’t bear to play alone up there.’ This was a little sentimental for Donald’s taste. Donald was not, in truth, a very nice man. Bluff and blunt, he disassociated himself from emotion, believing it to be the territory of women, children and weak-brained idiots.

  Evangeline, never particularly stable, became morbid. She was convinced that her remaining children were going to be plucked from her arms, one by one (she was right, of course), and eventually Donald gave in to her insistent wish that the remnant of her family be brought up back in Scotland away from metropolitan dangers.

  The house – ‘Woodhaven’ at Kirkton of Craigie in the glen – was not the most hospitable of homes. Built from local stone and decorated with Alpine gables, it was little more than a glorified Victorian hunting lodge, erected by Donald’s father, Roderick. It was a cold place and a succession of housekeepers and servants had failed to warm it up. Donald, however, was quite content with this move as he could spend all his time now shooting and fishing and generally destroying everything that ran or flew on his rainy estate.

  Evangeline concentrated on keeping her sons alive, feeding them on oatmeal and potatoes and boiled chickens and keeping them well away from disease, immorality and nursemaids. She had to be particularly vigilant when it came to the large amounts of water threatening them at every turn. The river Kittrie flowed not a hundred yards from the house and had been partially diverted on the instruction of Roderick to feed a small, artificial loch he had created. This had been stocked with a great many young trout and, accidentally, a rogue baby pike which fed at leisure on its companions and grew to be legendary. Roderick devoted the rest of his life to trying to catch it.

  The boys were all taught to swim in case of accident as well as being made to undertake regular walks and suffering annual bracing holidays at the island holiday home—

  ‘You mean here?’

  ∼ Yes, don’t interrupt – and were forced to sleep for ten hours every night with their bedroom windows wide open, even in winter, so that they were sometimes woken by snow falling on their faces. By the time they were in their teens they were all in astonishingly good health with strong teeth, straight bones, good manners and clean habits and were, as everyone remarked, a great credit to their mother and their country.

  When they went off to school, to Glenalmond, Evangeline wrote each of them a letter every week begging them to eat well, refrain from unhealthy thoughts and be vigilant around water, sharp objects and occupants of the sick bay.

  When war was declared and the Hun were begging for a good thrashing Douglas was amongst the first to volunteer to give it to them. Feudalism still being a concept that was understood properly in that part of Scotland at the time, his example was followed by a swathe of his father’s tenants from the glen. Torquil crossed to France three months later and Murdo decided he wasn’t going to be left out of their adventures. Although he had been brought up not to lie, he swore to a recruiting officer that he was eighteen years old – he was fifteen – and eager to fight the foe. The recruiting officer signed him up with a conspirator’s wink.

  They died in reverse order to that in which they’d been born. Murdo fell at Mons, neatly decapitated by a shell and six months later Torquil was lost for ever, drowning in the mud of no man’s land. Donald and Evangeline were not told at first because Torquil’s commanding officer thought he might eventually turn up but after a few weeks it became clear that those calcium-rich bones of his were going to secretly fertilize foreign soil for years to come.

  A year later, Douglas was accidentally shot by his own side. He lived for several minutes after the bullet entered his brain and the snow that started falling on his face made him think that he was lying in his bed at home with the snow blowing off the hills through the window and that his brothers were safely asleep in their adjacent bedrooms (which in some ways they were), dreaming of their lives to come. Little Honoria had clearly been determined on her full complement of playmates.

  Evangeline and Donald called their lost sons ‘the boys’, as if they were a single entity, rather than the individuals they had never really had the time to become. Donald comforted himself by imagining himself an unwilling Abraham, called upon to sacrifice his sons on the altar of patriotism. For a long time, Evangeline hung onto a secret hope that instead of drowning in mud, Torquil had deserted (she’d never been much of a patriot) and one day soon was going to walk up the long rhododendron-lined driveway, as jaunty as when he was alive. Time dulled this possibility and when the armistice was announced and there was still no sign of him, Evangeline decided that it was unlikely he would be coming home now and went down to the laundry room and hanged herself with a length of washing-rope from a large hook in the wall the purpose of which had always puzzled the laundrymaids but which now seemed only too clear. The end.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ∼ The end.

  ‘Well, that was cheerful.’

  ∼ Don’t hold me responsible, Nora says with a careless shrug, blame the story, not the storyteller. Do you want more tea?

  Chez Bob

  Bob was fast asleep in bed when I entered the flat. The bedroom curtains were open and when I went to draw them I was reminded of Ferdinand – a comparison that couldn’t possibly work in Bob’s favour, especially as he was now sleepmumbling something about herring (‘They’ve got knives!’).

  Something caught my eye down on the street – a figure was standing in the doorway of a building. It was surely the woman who had asked me the time only a few minutes ago. She struck a match to light a cigarette and I could see her hair – the colour of old three-penny-bits – and her perfectly straight nose. I suddenly realized who it was that she had a look of – the height, her carriage, the way she stood with feet splayed – she was like a poor and scrawny version of my mother, a prototype of Nora that hadn’t quite worked. The little flame of the match caught something else too – bitterness in the set of her features, disappointment etched in her skin.

  ∼ What a good police witness you would make, Nora says, rather cynically.

  The woman caught sight of me, turned away, and disappeared into the darkness.

  I shivered with the cold and slid into bed beside Bob, who was clutching a blue rubber hot-water bottle in the shape of a small teddy-bear.

  ‘Show by the use of reason,’ he muttered, ‘that reason itself is unreliable.’

  I couldn’t help but wonder if Bob really had been to a John Martin concert. On page 36 I looked out of the third-floor window as if I’d just seen something interesting. The thing I had seen was Bob, deep in conversation with one of Archie’s postgraduate students, a young woman who was built like a pencil and whose doctoral thesis (Losing the Plot) was on Finnegans Wake, thus making her totally unsuitable for Bob. I would have thought it an innocent enough encounter if it hadn’t been for the expression on Bob’s face – bright and interested, almost, dare I say it, flirtatious. Had he looked at me like that once? If he had I could no longer remember. I hoped he wasn’t planning on being unfaithful to me, at least not with such a very plain girl.

  * * *

  ‘Shagging Shug?’ Bob said contemplatively when we were woken in the middle of the night by noises from Shug’s flat below. ‘Forever Changes’ was seeping up through the floorboards, a sure sign that Shug
was in a mellow mood. The strains of ‘Andmoreagain’ were counterpointed by the inarticulate grunts and troats of coition, with an occasional whinny that sounded suspiciously like Andrea.

  It’s impossible, as we all know, to fall asleep to the sounds of someone else’s lovemaking (except possibly Bob’s) and so we had to wait out the denouement. (What are they doing for so long?’ Bob puzzled.)

  To pass the time, Bob suggested a game. I vetoed his usual choices – ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’, the inevitable ‘I-Spy’ and Bob’s favourite game, naming the Seven Dwarves; he had never yet managed to get all seven at one time. Eventually we settled on ‘The Minister’s Cat Went Shopping’ (‘The Minister’s Cat went to town and bought an Aberdeen Angus cow,’ and so on), and by the time our downstairs neighbours had finally finished fornicating, the poor cat was trying to manoeuvre a large walnut wardrobe through the door of the manse.

  Just as I was finally dropping off to sleep, Bob said, ‘Oh yeah, that woman phoned again.’

  ‘And?’

  I said you did live here, after all.’

  ‘And?’ I prompted.

  ‘She said she’d be in touch.’

  ‘And you didn’t find out who she was?’

  ‘Was I supposed to?’

  Someone – Mother Nature, presumably – was hurling handfuls of sleet like wet sand at the window and I shivered and moved closer to Bob’s unyielding body and thought about Ferdinand in the hope that I would dream about him – I love my love with an F because he is Felicitous. I hate him with an F because he is Felonious. I fed him with Fern cakes and Forbidden fruit. His name is Ferdinand and he lives in the Far North – but instead all night long I dreamt I was a seagull because Bob had put his copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the only book he had actually read all year (apart from The It Book of Drugs), under my pillow.

  * * *

  I was awake at seven but it felt like the middle of the night. I tried and failed to go back to sleep. Bob was snoring with delirious abandon – a complex and apparently random pattern of snorts and dramatic gasps like a large carp drowning on air.

  Reluctantly, I heaved myself out of bed. At least there was electricity, even though it made little impression on the morning Murk. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and draped myself in a blanket so that I resembled a tepee and with a heavy heart began to type.

  * * *

  Jack Gannet was a man who believed there was a logic that underpinned existence and if he couldn’t find the logic then he had faith that it was unavailable rather than nonexistent. Absence of evidence, he said, did not mean evidence was absent. One of the men he relied upon to back this belief up was Henry Machin, the pathologist.

  Henry Machin picked up a scalpel and looked at it affectionately.

  ‘What do you think – accident?’ Jack Gannet asked hopefully.

  The pathologist laughed, a hollow sound that you could imagine came out of the same box as the noise of swishing scythes and hissing pendulums. ‘Doubt it,’ he said. He was one of those people who always saw the funny side of everything, Jack Gannet thought morosely.

  He threw a tentative glance at the new constable – Collins – to see if he was the fainting sort, but so far he looked normal. Whatever that was. Constable Collins, pale and gently loitering in the background, had helped to bring the dead woman ashore and felt that it was his duty to see his charge through to the end. Traces of her red nail varnish, he noticed, could still be seen where her fingertips hadn’t been eaten. He wondered what kind of sea-creatures did that. Shrimp? Constable Collins liked shrimp and often bought a tub of them when he was down on the Front. Did shrimp eat people? And if in turn you ate the shrimp did that technically make you into a cannibal? And what about scampi? His wife, who said she was dying of boredom – which would be a first for the medical world – was very fond of scampi. He couldn’t imagine what scampi looked like swimming around in the sea.

  ‘How long has she been in the water, do you think?’ Jack Gannet asked Henry Machin.

  ‘Hard to tell,’ the pathologist said. ‘At this time of year the water’s warm; decomposition sets in quickly. She looks a bit of a mess.’

  ‘So do I first thing in the morning,’ Jack Gannet said wearily. ‘Five days maybe?’ He kept his voice respectfully low when he was talking about the dead for sometimes he had this eerie feeling that they could hear him, that they hadn’t quite … gone.

  He knew this was no accident, he could feel it like a vibration, like an angry aura of wasps. Henry Machin slipped the scalpel into the dead mermaid flesh like a hot knife in butter and Constable Collins fainted quietly so as not to disturb anyone.

  * * *

  The morning post clattered through the letterbox. It contained a rather threatening note, signed by Joan, the departmental secretary, reminding me that my essay for Professor Cousins (‘Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy’ Discuss) was several weeks overdue. I wondered if it worked the other way round – Comedy plus Time equals Tragedy? Perhaps not.

  The brusque, almost callous, tone of the note indicated that it had been penned by someone other than Professor Cousins, who, even if he remembered omissions and absences, never cared enough to reprimand people for them.

  I decided that, rather than speak to him, I would leave him a letter, beseeching leniency, and plead a dying grandmother in mitigation. Is my grandmother dead? Or grandmothers in the plural, for surely there must have been two of them unless autogenesis runs in the family?

  ∼ Dead, Nora says.

  ‘And your grandmothers, what about them?’

  ∼ Very dead, and I only had one.

  But you can’t have only one grandmother, that’s illogical. Everyone has two. Don’t they?

  Reductio ad Absurdum

  I hadn’t actually expected to find Professor Cousins in his room as he was supposed to be giving a lecture on revenge tragedy at that time of day. Instead he was rifling through the drawers of his filing-cabinet. He seemed to be even more skittish than usual, laughing away to himself as he pulled out, and then discarded on the floor, an endless cache of photocopied timetables and study guides. I reminded him that he was supposed to be giving a lecture and he looked at me in astonishment and said, ‘Really?’ as if he’d never given one before in his life.

  I offered to help him find whatever it was he was looking for but this seemed to cause him even more amusement. ‘I can’t remember what I’m looking for,’ he said, ‘but, don’t worry, I will when I find it.’ He gave me a curious glance. ‘Can I help you with something, did you want to see me?’

  I told Professor Cousins that I’d come to write a note to him and he gestured wildly in the direction of his desk and said, ‘On you go, my dear, on you go then.’ It seemed the easiest thing to do somehow, so I slipped behind his desk and got out a pad of paper and started writing.

  Professor Cousins’ desk was very untidy, scattered with little bits of paper on which he had scrawled messages to himself in his spiky italic hand – ‘Buy fish!’ ‘Find glove!’ ‘Send letter!’

  ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore,’ he exclaimed suddenly, just as Martha Sewell passed his open door. She gave him an unreadable look. Professor Cousins waved to her. ‘That’s what I’m supposed to be teaching, isn’t it?’ he said to me.

  ‘Yes.’

  He sighed, looking very downcast.

  ‘I’m not in the lecture theatre either,’ I said in a feeble effort to comfort him. He made a helpless gesture and returned to the filing-cabinet, muttering something to himself on the lines of ‘Mummery flummery, mimsy whimsy, blah, blah, blab,’ before wandering out into the corridor, bleating Joan’s name in the ridiculous helpless tone he adopted in the belief that it endeared him to Joan, when in fact it drove her up the wall. When he’d gone I propped up my note for him between ‘Go to Draffens!’ and ‘Joan’s birthday!’ and discreetly pocketed the one that said ‘Mark Honours essays!’

  Seeing Martha had been a blow as I had been hoping to avoid her two o’
clock creative writing tutorial, but now that she’d seen me I supposed I was going to have to put in an appearance in her class. I looked up and was startled to see Watson Grant lowering in the doorway.

  ‘Goodness, what happened to you?’ I said to him, for his head was bandaged up and he was sporting a black eye that made him look more manly than he really was.

  ‘Mugged,’ he said miserably. ‘I was concussed, I’m lucky I’m not dead.’

  Professor Cousins came back at that moment, bearing aloft a cup of Joan-made tea. ‘Good God, man,’ he cried when he saw Grant Watson, ‘what on earth happened to you?’ When Watson Grant explained, Professor Cousins said, ‘Laid low by some anonymous stranger in the dark, eh?’ He proffered a Nuttall’s Minto but Grant Watson declined. ‘Concussion,’ Professor Cousins reminisced dreamily, ‘I was concussed once – during the war, or a war, certainly. Unconscious for the best part of an hour. When I came round I couldn’t remember anything, had no idea who I was. I rather liked it, looking back,’ he sighed regretfully; ‘a tabula rasa, a blank sheet of paper. A fresh start.’

  ‘And do you know who you are now?’ Watson Grant asked him with a little more asperity than usual. Professor Cousins looked thoughtful. ‘Well, I know who I think I am.’

  Me, I am Euphemia Stuart-Murray. I am the last of my line. My mother is not my mother.

  It does seem a little harsh of her to tell me this now, after twenty-one years. Although I always suspected there was something not quite right, some skeleton waiting to fall out of a cupboard. If she’s not my mother how did she acquire me?

  ‘Did you steal me? Did you find me?’

  ∼ It wasn’t quite like that.

  ‘Well what is it like, for heaven’s sake?’ My mother stares into the empty hearth. Not my actual, factual mother, of course, for she – apparently – is dead. It turns out that I have been wrong all along – I am not a semi-orphan, I am a complete orphan, whole and entire. I belong to no-one.