Wait Till I Tell You (9 page)

It rocked around the corner, maroon and white, ‘Nemo me impune lacessit’ on the side, just as the old woman’s hand came for my arm. ‘Grace, he’d say, Grace, we’ve just time, here, now, here, against the wall, quick get yer skirts up.’

Later, though we’d had only milk while our mothers had frothy pink chocolate and cinnamon toast with their feet crunching among the bags under the table in the Chocolate House, I was sick, and I saw that stinking woman tied with string waddle down to the grey sea, her dog beside her flirting its petticoats, nosing in the shingle at the edge of the cold real waves.

Wally Dugs

When she put her hand in the peke’s ruff of silky blonde hair, you’d only to think of her lifting the wee dog up to her old head and pulling the thing down over it like a wig to get some notion of what Grisel Carnegie had looked like when she had been the prima ballerina
assoluta
of Esme Stewart’s heart. Now you could see her skull’s shifting plates through the spun-up hair, and as she chewed, there was a clicking sounded like a frog looks when it swallows down some midgey morsel. She took her lunch in by degrees, making dolly meals on the fork and then edging it up to her mouth, avoiding her nephew’s eyes when she actually snapped and swallowed. Beauty was ever ill-served by the act itself of eating. Esme had loved her little appetite, saw it for an expression of that sweet passivity so light and downy and otherwise unimposing in a ladylike woman, a woman with whom you would be proud to be seen and with whom you need never converse save anent that which was pleasant. Esme had been an advocate, lovely on his feet in the court, Grisel imagined, as on the dance floor, with his long robe making much of his gestures, the little wig not undignified but proper to his office. She had naturally never witnessed him as he strode and ranted and dealt out fiery justice in the court. But he was well spoken of, she remembered that, and she could still, all these years later, induce people to mention him, frequently favourably, and that was like a sip at sugary tea. She was a sipper, never wishing immersion in sensations. Those sips did her fine, as they always had.

Glenbervie was not a Home. It was strange how unreassuring the word home could become once you were older. Anyway, Glenbervie wasn’t, so that was all settled. As a matter of interest, Ailsa and Carl had looked around a considerable number of Homes before deciding that Glenbervie, a warden-supervised sheltered development, would be superior in every respect. She’d a patio, a hot plate for keeping dishes warm when she’d guests, a terrific view of the whatname hills and a button to get through to the warden all hours of the day. And night, but she could not imagine having the bare face to use it. Ailsa visited a bit less now because the baby was walking and she said she didn’t trust her around the trinkets, she’d never forgive herself if Rhona smashed a piece in the famous china collection. Grisel had a lifetime’s aviary of china birdies, all up on the sliding-front cabinet where she kept the glasses with the capitals of Europe written on them, with a landmark on too, that tower for Paris, a ruin for Rome, and a guardsman for London. Madrid had had a bull as she remembered but it was long broken, not in the move to Glenbervie but at some fairly riotous gathering where a hem had caught the glass and sent it flying. Skirts could do that then, sticking out and solid with net and Vylene, full of starch as an ashet of mashed potatoes. They were becoming though, to anyone with a dancer’s bearing, like herself. The stiff skirt would encircle its wearer like a big flower, making her little legs just wavy stamens among the rustling petals of petticoat. You’d to crush the skirt to yourself at night in a car, both to get in and so as not to impede visibility. The rustling petty was right up there with a life of its own misting up the windscreen and rising like boiling sugar to fill the side windows before you knew it. The way to control those skirts, Grisel Carnegie knew, as the girl who had broken the glass with Madrid and maybe a bull maybe a cow on had not known, was to furl them like an umbrella, the way a bindweed flower is turned on itself before its first time of opening, the time after which it just flushes up in colour then falls limp like a thing forgotten, a hankie maybe. To furl up your skirt you stood with your hands by your side and turned your hands against your upper legs as though you were twisting the top and bottom of yourself in two at the waist. The bell of the skirt followed naturally. It was like that with garments. You either did or did not know how to make them do as you wished. Grisel could honestly say she had never known her clothes step out of line. Gloves had remained wed to each other, her appropriately treed shoes had not pinched, and no button had ever broken with its hole.

She’d not been young either when she had favoured those big skirts like flowers, but she had taken good care of her appearance with the result that she’d the waistline younger women had lost to the reproductive urge. Not that old, mind, but approaching an age about which to be discreet. Esme had understood that, of course.

What age Esme had been Miss Carnegie did not know. She could have made enquiries, there were plenty of folk must have known him at school and then at the University, but she preferred a little haziness, a little of what she liked to refer to as romance. The more veils it dons the closer romance sidles to untruth, but Grisel was for beauty over truth, fortunate, perhaps, when all was said and done, at Glenbervie.

The china birds were cast in attitudes, the attitudes of real birds, which no real bird will hold for longer than an instant. The effect of many colourful frozen creatures, shiny, without the softness and blur of feather, tapping a coy ceramic snail or arrested on a frosty twig, was lightly deathly. The birds were demanding when it came to dusting, more demanding than one living bird might have been about its seed and water. But Grisel had forsworn living pets when she left her Pekinese with Ailsa and Carl.

‘Taking that dog, it’s like a matrimonial visit,’ Carl would tell Ailsa when he got home. God, he was pleased to get home, too. You never knew the meaning of the word ‘home’ till you’d been to a place like Glenbervie for the best part of a day, including the drive. ‘She holds on that tight to the bloody dog’ – he set it down now on the coir matting in their front hall – ‘and it has nothing at all to say to her and looks guilty and embarrassed and desperate for a cigarette.’

Neither of them disliked the dog that much or they would not have relented about having it put to sleep when the warden at Glenbervie explained that dogs were not ideal for the ambience of the residential complex. The baby weeded at the dog’s rich coat for hours, and kissed its squashed face. The Peke permitted liberties from the baby it would have bitten off at the knee in anyone else. Indeed, the dog’s and the baby’s size, gait and expression were increasingly similar: each could look outraged or appealing, each was prone to soon-forgotten rage. But the animal would keep its glamour as young humans rarely do, although baby Rhona was one of those changelings who astonish by their dissimilarity to plain parents, so dog and baby were a strange, bewitching pair, frailly matched for the time being.

Once Carl had his drink and Ailsa was sitting over from him on the other sofa with the dog and the baby in a tangle at her side making, it had to be admitted, a regrettable state of the sage velvet stripe, he began his story of the day. The way to tell it was to save the marrow in the bone till the end, to worry at the tale until it split and the nourishing part was there at last. For Ailsa, so certain of her own freedom from dependence – even upon Carl, who was after all only a man – the cream of the joke was always Esme, how he came in to the fortnightly encounter of her husband and her aunt-by-marriage as they sat in the sheltered chalet in the shadow of the whatname hills surrounded by china birds and pecking at food intended as festive and failing in that intention, an inch of fish here, a jot of jelly there, and lashings of Carnation milk for a treat. The Carnation came in a lovat-green earthenware jug marked ‘Brora’. Not that she’d been any of these places, the old coot, but it did make present-giving simple enough. Just keep your eyes peeled for a place-name and snap it up. Sensible un-dependent Ailsa had no patience for bits and bobs, it was like clothes, a waste of time and money just to give yourself allergies with the dusting or, in the case of clothes, acute discomfort. Ailsa favoured the untailored, the non-iron, the elasticated.

It was appalling to see how Grisel still kept all that nonsense up, with her assisted hair and the kitten heels to her old lady’s shoes. Surely she could shut down on her appearance now? She’d been playing that tune all her life. Might it not be a relief to change stations? Tune out of being feminine, tune in to feminism maybe. Ailsa loved her feminism, it was so dependable a comfort. She knew she would cope fine if Carl was inconsiderate enough to leave life before she did. She was a natural coper, so she thought. She knew what was what, she often said, only very occasionally acknowledging the disappointed voice within that asked if this was it, was there nothing more, nothing along the lines of what she sometimes glimpsed in her sleep or heard in music or flowing water, a sheen in the air.

Carl was spinning out the drive, making it all as boring as possible, partly to make Ailsa feel bad but also, she hoped, for they were not on bad terms, to whet her appetite for any fun to come. ‘So eventually I get off the A9 anyhow and cruise down to the Alpine Village itself. Usual smell of rubber briefs and grey potatoes and a wee dab of cologne for the Sabbath. I’m dying for a drink, of course.’

She knew what to ask. ‘Gay Paree? Romantic Rome?’

‘It was London this time, and a sherry. She must have laid it in for me. Mobile shop service looking up.’

‘Just the one?’

‘Two out of her and one solo in the kitchen.’ That’ll be five in all, thought Ailsa.

‘She serves out the dinner slow so it’s cold on those ferocious hot plates and sizzling but chilly, the Brussels still frozen at the middle and smelling like cats on the outside. I put Carnation on the mashed-potato balls just for some variety. Christ, have me put down by the time I’m old, will you not?’

I will, Ailsa thought, don’t worry. Illness had no place in her understanding of the world. But I, she continued in her strong mind, intend to live for a long time after you are gone, and always to be myself and do as I will. It did not occur to her that she might ever become an old lady in a colony of old ladies, cooking bland food for ungrateful connections, and shopping from a van full of tins. She would be splendid, and wilful, and eat garlic. No one would discuss her after visiting her save with admiration.

‘Yellow jelly?’

‘Red jelly.’

The baby tried to copy her parents, ‘Ledlellyälellylelly.’ The parents dismissed this primitive vocaläising. The dog jumped down off the sofa one end before the other, it was hard, beneath the hair, to tell which, and shimmered over to the fireplace. There was no fire in the grate but a white paper fan, made anew by Ailsa annually to fill the fire basket in the summer months. She was good with her hands, undomesticated but stylish.

The baby followed the dog to the fireplace with the vehemence of reunited love. The two, dog and baby, big-eyed, snubnosed, took up their places before the empty fire. It was not yet dark outside, the city had not settled down beneath its skyline. Carl made to get another drink. Ailsa took his glass from him. In the pocket of his jacket was the remains of a packet of dry roast nuts he’d got at the filling-station. He tipped the lot into his mouth while Ailsa fetched the new drink. She made it weak. It wasn’t so much the health side of his eating and drinking that bothered her – what would be would be – but she was put off when he had overmuch to drink. He grew slobbery, asking for reassurance, even declarations. To make up for the weakness of the whisky she caressed his neck when she returned and pretended to be more interested than she was in his relating of the day at Glenbervie. She concentrated with the top of her mind on recollecting, detail by detail, the living-room of Grisel Carnegie; the rest of her mind she allowed to swim. She didn’t need a drink to find an easy drifting movement to her thoughts. Unadmitted dissatisfaction had given her a talent for dreaming that she would have denied utterly. But the truth was that alongside her marriage to Carl and the tiring business of having Rhona, she ran dreams in her head like films without end. Their matter was not dramatic, but softly eventful. She was not a heroine but an object of curiosity, even longing, to unspecified, unnamed creatures, perhaps not even men. The glow of anticipation and undisturbed aftermath was the climate of her lower, denied, dreaming.

What Carl and sensible Ailsa could not take about his aunt was the way she made of her eventless life a romance, as though that life had been enough for her. It was a way of rationalising a totally pointless existence, they agreed. The titivation, the unconsummation, were all part of a sickness which only in recent years had been shaken off by women, that much was obvious. Now women not only knew what they wanted, but went after it and got it, not like Grisel with her net petticoats that had netted nothing, and her silent china companions and dreams of a man who’d lived with his mother and gone to dancing classes in his fifties. Illusions, breakable illusions, was all Carl’s aunt had, he thought. Look at Ailsa, now, she’d never wander like that in her thoughts, yearning for something nobody could put a name to. He prided himself in knowing what was in Ailsa’s wee mind, he really did. Like now, he knew it would be the room at Glenbervie, the flock of motionless birds.

Beneath that picture, which was indeed in Ailsa’s mind, hovering at the surface of it, something stirred and fluttered, never quite roosting. The texture of her dreaming was light but dense, like a field of high flowers, like a net in slow water. Something was approaching her, something wonderful, over the meadow, through the water.