When the World Was Steady (20 page)

Mrs Simpson shifted uncomfortably. ‘Not that I was ever in touch with. Mother had a sister, but they lost contact early on. I
never met her. She didn’t marry.’

‘Did your mother bring you back here, then, when
you
were young?’

‘No, never.’

Virginia reflected that it was odd that her mother should have clung so to her own mother’s birthplace, when there had clearly never been any obvious connection. But aloud, she said, ‘What should we do about supper? I don’t really feel like sitting around doing nothing.’

‘No, true, thinking never did anybody any good.’ Mrs Simpson swivelled, with some effort, and put her feet to the floor. ‘My back aches,’ she said, ‘from sitting all that time in the car. I’m not up to going far, to tell the truth.’

‘There’s a pub along the pier,’ said Virginia. ‘They might have something.’

‘Full of sailors and navvies, on a port.’

‘It’s worth a look. I don’t know that there’s much else around.’

‘I remember having a delicious meal—when we came that time—where was it now?’

‘That was forty years ago.’

‘It was more than that.’

Virginia wanted to take her mother’s arm on the stairs, because from behind Mrs Simpson looked so bent and frail. It crossed her mind that the disruptions of the past week were nothing compared to the rupture that her mother’s death would be. Sometimes, it was true, she felt only a most un-Christian hatred for her parent, but with her faith wavering, it suddenly seemed that this was the relationship that defined Virginia’s reality, that Mrs Simpson had been the only solid ground in all the years since Virginia had come home to her. And now she was so small.

Mrs Simpson stumbled slightly on the penultimate step, and clung to the banister with both hands.

‘Mother!’ Virginia cried, trying to embrace her and set her aright, finding in this mishap an outlet for her high emotion.

‘Damnation, Ginny!’ said Mrs Simpson, regaining her balance and slapping at her daughter, ‘Look what you’ve done to my bust!’

It was true that on one side the prosthesis had slipped, but Ginny didn’t see that it could have been her fault and she said as much. She tried to set the foam to rights, but Mrs Simpson slapped her away again, grumbling. ‘You’re just making it worse. Absolutely useless. Always have been.’

The pub was now hushed. Its dim lights were still on, and the tinny music still dribbled out into the evening air, but the customers had vanished. A lone fisherman in an oilcloth jacket sat astride a stool, with three pints lined up in front of him on the bar. Mrs Simpson took a seat by the door and scowled at the room around her.

‘It doesn’t look to me as though there’s any supper to be had here,’ she said. ‘So I suppose I’ll settle for a whisky and water.’ She tucked her ankles underneath her chair and straightened her back.

Even in the dim light, Virginia could see the dark pockets beneath her mother’s eyes, the complicated tracery of lined skin and exhaustion.

‘They must be able to get us something,’ Virginia said.

‘Fraid not,’ the surly landlord informed her as he poured their drinks. ‘You won’t find anything to eat around here.’

‘Nothing?’

‘There’s the White Lion on the hill, it’s about fifteen minutes’ walk, but they’ll only be serving another half hour and you’d be lucky to make it, with your companion slow on her feet. Cost you, too, the White Lion.’

‘Nothing else? At all?’

‘There’s the chippie,’ said the landlord. He didn’t look convinced. There was a gurgling sound as the fisherman drained one of his three pints.

‘I’m sure that would suit us very well. Where’s that?’

‘Just up from the pier here, towards the square. ’Tisn’t the finest, but it’ll do.’

‘There’s a fish and chip shop, Mother,’ said Virginia, carefully placing their drinks on the cardboard coasters provided. ‘That’ll be OK, won’t it?’

‘Absolutely OK.’ Mrs Simpson didn’t look at Virginia. Her overly-bright eyes were taking in the smeared whitewash walls, the sticky plank floor, the fisherman’s broad backside. She brought her drink to her lips without looking at it, like a blind person, and took a very little sip. ‘It’s odd to be here,’ she said. ‘I didn’t really believe we’d make it.’

‘Do you suppose it’s changed a lot?’

‘Since when?’

Virginia was silent. Since when, indeed? Her mother had clearly hardly ever been to this place in all her seventy-nine years, and her idea of it was practically fictional. One visit, forty-two years before, with two small children in tow, did not constitute any kind of real knowledge. ‘Is it what you expected, then?’

‘It’s more or less what I remembered,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘I don’t think it’s changed too much.’

‘Remembered from when?’

Mrs Simpson sipped thoughtfully at her drink. ‘Tomorrow, I’ll take you across to Alt-na-Ross. Perhaps we could take a picnic if the weather’s fine.’

‘Are you planning to ask about your relatives?’

‘Yours too,’ snapped Mrs Simpson. ‘I hadn’t really thought about it.’

Virginia considered losing her temper: what was the point of this trip, after all? But instead she merely nodded and traced the word ‘stupid’ in the sweat of her cider glass, invisible to anyone but herself. ‘Are you hungry then?’

‘Yes. Although, fish and chips …’

There’s no choice.’

‘No.’

They sat in silence, but for the sounds of the fisherman swilling and clinking, and the muffled rendition of a popular song coming from a distant speaker. When a telephone rang, it made both Simpsons start.

‘Kenneth Campbell?’ asked the landlord loudly, as though calling through a crowd. ‘It’s for Kenneth Campbell.’

The fisherman grunted and slid off his stool. He stood at the end of the bar and muttered into the receiver for some time, and while he did so, Virginia took her mother’s elbow and helped her to her feet. ‘Thank you,’ she called to the landlord. ‘We’re off for supper now.’ She was disappointed. She had thought the pub would be an adventure.

‘Up to the corner, turn left,’ said the landlord. ‘It’s the only place with any lights on.’

‘Where
is
everybody?’ asked Virginia.

‘They’ve all gone home. Everybody’s home now.’

‘Not me,’ said Kenneth Campbell, back on his stool, tapping at his two empty pint glasses and preparing to make inroads into the third. ‘Fill ’em up.’

Outside, the light was as it had been, although it was getting late. It was pale grey, neither bright nor ominous, a light that did not indicate any time of day at all, as though a brief moment had been held and stretched, indefinitely.

‘Midsummer light,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘Remarkable.’

‘I find it a bit sinister myself I like day to be day and night to be night. The air is the colour of the sea. It’s wrong.’

‘Whatever happened to the Scot in your soul, Virginia?’

‘I wasn’t aware of his presence. And his absence has not exactly been a cause for concern all these years.’

‘Maybe not for you. But I’m convinced that if you had been more Scottish you would have been happier in life.’

‘I see.’

Mrs Simpson’s ramblings were making Virginia herself feel very stable indeed, and more than a little annoyed with her mother.

‘I’ve had quite a happy time, despite everything, and I feel I owe it to my Scottish nature,’ Mrs Simpson went on. ‘I have always considered my deepest impulses to be Scottish.’

‘Do I take it, then, that you’ve spent your life in exile?’

‘Not at all. It’s something you take with you. I think Emmy has it. And look how far she’s gone. I always thought you took after your father. He, of course, dear man, was not remotely Scottish.’

‘No. Of course not.’

The chip shop did not look particularly salubrious. It had a fluorescent light, and a grinning fish in a top hat painted on the window in blue paint. Neither the floor nor the counter nor the pinafore of the waitress was very clean. There was nowhere to sit down. And the girl’s forearms were covered with burns from the spattered fat, as well as some scabby places she had quite obviously been picking at when they came in. She wore a little badge that said
MARY
on it.

‘Good evening, Mary,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘What might you have to offer us this evening?’

‘I’m not Mary. Mary’s off tonight. I’m Alice.’ She fingered her badge. ‘It’s Mary’s uniform, that’s all.’

‘So, Alice, what do you recommend?’

‘T’all tastes the same, really, once it’s fried. It’s the batter, you see. We use the same batter for all of them.’

‘I think I’ll have scampi,’ said Virginia, seeing it on the board.

‘The scampi are frozen. They come from London. But they taste just the same. It’d take a while to do ’em.’

‘What’s done, then?’

Alice pointed with a pair of tongs at a little pile of assorted
food, huddled under the heat lamp. ‘Sausage, one portion. Cod, three portions. Hake, one portion extra large. One chicken and mushroom pie. And we have chips.’ She put down the tongs and started to pick at a scab on her elbow. ‘Most people come for chips of an evening. So we don’t fry up too much else. Wastage,’ she explained, nodding.

‘Cod for me,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘And chips. And a Coca-Cola.’

‘And the same.’

The girl slapped the lot on to two cardboard plates and salted and vinegared vigorously without asking. Then she rolled the plates into two cumbersome newsprint packages, through which the grease instantly started to seep.

‘Is there anywhere we can go to eat this?’ Virginia asked as she paid.

The girl looked blank. ‘Outside somewhere, I reckon.’

‘It’s a bit damp, outside.’

The girl shrugged. ‘You can ask at the pub on the pier if he’ll let you eat in there. But he’s no charmer, MacAllister. There’s always the breakwater. But she’—a nod at Mrs Simpson—‘might not be comfortable. Because of the gulls, you know.’

As the two women perched themselves on the breakwater, a flock of gulls did indeed swoop in from around the bay to scream and jeer at their feet. Some landed on the far side of the wall, in the water, where they bobbed up and down menacingly. They were very loud.

‘Well,’ said Virginia, unravelling her newsprint. ‘Here we are.’

Mrs Simpson did not look up from her soggy mess of food. ‘I won’t grace that with a reply,’ she said. ‘There is no need to be sarcastic. I’m sure we’ll do better tomorrow.’

‘I wasn’t being sarcastic.’

‘Just shush. And eat, before these damn birds move in and pluck our eyes out.’

Both women were piling chips into their mouths with an air of quiet desolation when Kenneth Campbell emerged from the pub, pint in hand, and made his way over to where they sat.

‘Evening, ladies,’ he called before he reached them. ‘Not so fine for eating out, is it?’

‘No,’ said Mrs Simpson. ‘It’s not.’

‘Never mind. The weather’s always rotten around here. Absolutely terrible. Mind if I join you?’ He sat as he asked.

‘I suppose not, Mr Campbell.’

‘How d’you know—’

‘In the pub. The phone call.’

‘Right. He’s a right creep, that MacAllister.’

‘You’re not Scottish,’ said Virginia.

‘Well, I am and I ain’t, as they say. Grew up in Northumberland, as a matter of fact.’

‘Are you tracing your roots? We’re tracing our roots,’ said Virginia.

‘No way. Wouldn’t want to find ’em. No. I run a fishing boat out of the Sound, here. Scallops.’

‘How interesting.’

‘I’ve been here a couple of years. That’s two years too long if you ask me.’ He balanced his drink on the wall and took a greasy handkerchief from his pocket. He proceeded to wipe his face with it. He was a wiry man of about forty-five, and his hair was oily and colourless, but his face, Virginia remarked, was not unattractive. He had the reddening of drink in his skin, but his eyes were clear.

‘What’s wrong with Skye?’ asked Mrs Simpson, who had been eyeing him with disdain since he arrived. ‘You should count yourself lucky to make a living in such a spectacular place.’

‘Maybe I should. Good scallops, at any rate. But the people! And the weather! And even the landscape isn’t a patch on Northumberland. Can I buy you ladies a drink?’

‘We’re eating our supper,’ said Mrs Simpson sharply, as if that in itself were an answer.

‘I’ll bring ’em out to you.’

‘How kind,’ said Virginia. ‘A cider for me—sweet. A half. And a whisky for Mother, with water.’

‘What has come over you?’ asked Mrs Simpson, as soon as Kenneth Campbell entered the pub. ‘Must we consort with such people? He’s not even Scottish! And I’m quite sure he’s no Christian, if you’re interested.’

‘I was only meeting good manners with good manners, Mother. Something I thought you believed in.’

‘You surprise me. You really do.’

Virginia had surprised herself, rather. But she was tired of waiting, she thought. She wasn’t quite sure what she meant by this, but it seemed a good explanation.

Kenneth Campbell was gone for some minutes—long enough, Virginia suspected, for him to have a pint or two before rejoining them. And sure enough, when he re-emerged, he was more obviously weaving than before. He seemed to be splashing the three drinks he carried into each other as well as on to the ground and on to his coat.

‘He’s drunk, Virginia. How could you?’

‘I’m not blind. It’s a question of courtesy. We’ll only stay a couple of minutes, and then we can go back to our room.’

‘For the ladies!’ He cheered as he plunked the drinks unsteadily on the wall. ‘To your health.’

‘I’m cold, Virginia. I’m going to catch cold.’

‘In a minute, Mother.’

‘Now that’s a nice name, Virginia. A fancy name for a fancy lady,’ said the fisherman, leaning towards her.

‘It’s just a name,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose, Mr Campbell, that you believe in God?’

‘Hey?’

‘Are you a Christian, Mr Campbell?’

‘I’m not a Yid, if that’s what you mean. Or an Arab. By God, no. Are you?’

‘Oh Virginia,
really,’
interjected Mrs Simpson, ‘this is ridiculous. I’m not a Christian and I can see that he’s not either. It doesn’t take a genius. And so what? Are you coming? Because if not, I’ll go up to the room on my own.’