When Will There Be Good News? (4 page)

Reggie thought Ms MacDonald was lucky that she'd had lots o
f
time to adjust to the fact that she was dying. Reggie didn't like th
e
idea that you could be walking along as blithe as could be an
d
the next moment you simply didn't exist. Walk out of a room, ste
p
into a taxi. Dive into the cool blue water of a pool and never come back up again. Nada y pues nada.

'Did you interview a lot of girls for this job?' Reggie asked D
r
Hunter and she said, 'Loads and loads,' and Reggie said, 'You're
a
terrible liar, Dr H.,' and Dr Hunter blushed and laughed and said, 'It'
s
true. I know. I can't even play Cheat. I had a good feeling about yo
u
though,' she added and Reggie said, 'Well, you should always trus
t
your feelings, Dr H.' Which wasn't something that Reggie actuall
y
believed because her mother had been following her feelings whe
n
she went off on holiday with Gary and look what happened there.

And Billy's feelings rarely led him to a good place. He might be
a
runt but he was a vicious runt.

'Call me Jo,' Dr Hunter said.

Dr Hunter said that she hadn't wanted to go back to work and tha
t
ifit was up to her she would never leave the house.

Reggie wondered why it wasn't up to her. Well, 'Neil's' business had 'hit a sticky patch', Dr Hunter explained. (He'd been 'let down' and 'some things had fallen through'.) Whenever she talked about Mr Hunter's business Dr Hunter screwed up her eyes as if she was trying to make out the details of something a long way off.

When she was at the surgery Dr Hunter phoned home all the time to make sure the baby was OK. Dr Hunter liked to talk to him and she had long one-sided conversations while, at his end, the baby tried to eat the phone. Reggie could hear Dr Hunter saying, 'Hello, sweet pea, are you having a lovely day?' and 'Mummy will be home soon, be good for Reggie.' Or a lot of the time she recited scraps of poems and nursery rhymes, she seemed to know hundreds and she Was always suddenly coming out with 'Diddle, diddle, dumpling, my son John' or 'Georgie Porgie pudding and pie'. She knew a lot of stuff that was very English and quite foreign to Reggie, who had been brought up on 'Katie Bairdie had a coo', and 'A fine wee lassie, a bonnie wee lassie was bonny wee Jeannie McCall'.

Ifthe baby was asleep when she phoned, Dr Hunter asked Reggie to put the dog on instead. ('I forgot to mention something,' Dr Hunter said at the end of their 'interview' and Reggie thought, uh-oh, the baby's got two heads, the house is on the edge of a cliff, her husband's a crazy psycho, but Dr Hunter said, 'We have a dog. Do you like dogs?'

'Totally. Love 'em. Really. Sweartogod.')

Although the dog couldn't speak it seemed to understand the concept of phone conversations (,Hello, puppy, how's my gorgeous girl?') better than the baby did and it listened alertly to Dr Hunter's voice while Reggie held the receiver to its ear.

Reggie had been alarmed when she first saw Sadie -a huge German shepherd who looked as if she should be guarding a building site. 'Neil was worried about how the dog would react when the baby came along,' Dr Hunter said. 'But I would trust her with my life, with the baby's life. I've known Sadie longer than I've known anyone except for Neil. I had a dog when I was a child but it died and then my father wouldn't let me get another one. He's dead now too, so it just goes to show.'

Reggie wasn't sure what it went to show. 'Sorry,' Reggie said. 'For your loss.' Like they said in police dramas on TV She'd meant for the dead dog but Dr Hunter took it to mean her father. 'Don't be,' she said. 'He outlived himself a long time ago. Call me Jo.' Dr Hunter had quite a thing about dogs. 'Laika,' she would say, 'the first dog in space. She died of heat and stress after a few hours. She was rescued from an animal centre, she must have thought she was going to a home, to a family, and instead they sent her to the loneliest death in the world. How sad.'

Dr Hunter's father continued a half-life in his books -he had been a writer -and Dr Hunter said he had once been very fashionable (,Famous in his day,' she laughed) but his books hadn't 'stood the test of time'. 'This is all that's left of him now,' she said, leafing through a musty book titled The Shopkeeper. 'Nothing of my mother left at all,' Dr Hunter said. 'Sometimes I think how nice it would be to have
a
brush o
. R
a co~b: an object that she touched every day, that was par
t
of her hfe. But It s all gone. Don't take anything for granted, Reggie.'

'No fear of that, Dr H.'

'Look away and it's gone.'

'I know, believe me.'

Dr Hunter had relegated a pile
of her
father's novels to an unstabl
e
heap in the corner of the little windowless boxroom on the top floor. It was a big cupboard really, 'not a room at all', Dr Hunter said, although actually it was bigger than Reggie's bedroom in Gorgie. Dr Hunter called it 'the junk repository' and it was full of all kinds of t~ings that no one knew what to do with -a single ski, a hockey stIck, an old duvet, a broken computer printer, a portable television that didn't work (Reggie had tried) and a large number ofornaments that had been Christmas or wedding presents. 'Quelle horreurf' Dr Hunter laughed when she occasionally poked her head in there. 'Some of this stuff is truly hideous,' she said to Reggie. Hideous or not, she couldn't throw them away because they were gifts and 'gifts had to be honoured'.

'Except for Trojan horses,' Reggie said.

'But, on the other hand, don't look a gift horse in the mouth,' Dr Hunter said.

'Perhaps sometimes you should,' Reggie said.

'Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,' Dr Hunter said.

'Totally.'

N
. O
t honoured for ever, Reggie noticed, because every time a plastIC charity bag slipped through the letterbox Dr Hunter filled it with items from the junk repository and put it -rather guiltily -out on the doorstep. 'No matter how much I get rid of there's never any less,' she sighed.

'Law of physics,' Reggie said.

. T
he rest of the house was very tidy and decorated with tasteful thmgs -rugs and lamps and ornaments. A different class of ornament from. Mum's collections of thimbles and miniature teapots tha
t
de t h* . '

Spl e t elr SIze, took up valuable space in the Gorgie flat.

The Hunters' house was Victorian and although it had every modern comfort it still had all its original fireplaces and doors and cornices, which Dr Hunter said was a miracle. The front door had coloured glass panels, starbursts ofred, snowflakes ofblue and rosettes of yellow that cast prisms of colour when the sun shone through. There was even a full set of servants' bells and a back staircase that had allowed the servants to scurry around unseen. 'Those were the days,' Mr Hunter said and laughed because he said if he had been alive when the house was built he would have been making fires and blacking boots, 'And you, too, probably, Reggie,' while 'Joanna' would have been 'swanning around upstairs like Lady Muck' because her family came from money.

'It's all gone,' Dr Hunter said when Reggie looked at her enquiringly.

'Unfortunately,' Mr Hunter said.

'Bad investments, nursing-home bills, squandered on trifles,' Dr Hunter said, as if the getting and spending of money was meaningless. 'My grandfather was rich but profligate, apparently,' she said.

'And we are poor but honest,' Mr Hunter said.

'Apparently,' Dr Hunter said.

Actually, Dr Hunter admitted one day, there had been some money left and she had used it to buy this 'very, very expensive house'. 'An investment,' Mr Hunter said. 'A home,' Dr Hunter said.

The kitchen was Reggie's favourite room. You could have fitted the whole of Reggie's Gorgie flat into it and still had room for swinging a few elephants if you were so inclined. Surprisingly, Mr Hunter liked cooking and was always making a mess in the kitchen. 'My creative side,' he said. 'Women cook food because people need to eat,' Dr Hunter said. 'Men cook to show off.'

There was even a pantry, a small, cold room with a flagged floor and stone shelves and a wooden door that had a pattern of cut-out hearts on the panels. Dr Hunter kept cheese and eggs and bacon in there, as well as all her tinned and dried goods. 'I should make jam,' she said guiltily in the summer. 'A pantry like this begs for homemade jam.'Now that it was nearly Christmas she said, 'I feel bad that 1 haven't made mincemeat. Or a Christmas cake. Or a pudding. Th
e
pantry is begging for a pudding, wrapped in a cloth and full ofsilve
r
sixpences and charms.' Reggie wondered if Dr Hunter was thinkin
g
about her own Christmases when she was a child but Dr Hunte
r
said, 'Heavens, no.'

Reggie didn't think that the pantry was begging for anything
,
except possibly a bit ofa tidy. Mr Hunter was always rooting throug
h
there, looking for ingredients and spoiling Dr Hunter's neat ranks o
f
tins and jars.

Dr Hunter ('Call me Jo'), who didn't believe in religion, who didn't believe in 'any kind oftranscendence except that
of the
human spirit', believed most firmly in order and taste. 'Morris says that you should have nothing in your house that you don't know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful,' she said to Reggie when they were filling a pretty little vase (,Worcester') with flowers from the garden. Reggie thought she meant someone called Maurice, probably a gay friend, until she noticed a biography ofWilliam Morris on the bookshelf and thought, duh, stupid, because of course she knew who h
e
was. Twice a week a cleaner called Liz came in and moaned about how much work she had to do but Reggie thought she had it pretty easy because the Hunters had everything under control, they weren't housework Nazis or anything but they knew the difference between comfort and chaos, unlike Ms MacDonald whose entire house was a 'repository ofjunk' -bits of old crap everywhere, receipts and pens, clocks without keys, keys without locks, clothes piled on top of chests, pillars ofold newspapers, half a bicycle in the hallway that just appeared there one day, not to mention the forest's worth of books. Ms MacDonald used the imminence
of the
Rapture and the Second Coming as an excuse ('What's the point?') but really she was just a slovenly person. Ms MacDonald had 'got' religion (goodness knows where from) shortly after her tumour was diagnosed. The two things were not unrelated. Reggie thought that if she was being eaten alive by cancer she might start believing in God because it would be nice to think that someone out there cared, although Ms MacDonald's God didn't really seem the caring sort, in fact quite the opposite
,
indifferent to human suffering and intent on reckless destruction.

Dr Hunter had a big noticeboard in the kitchen, full of all kinds of things that gave you an insight into her life, like an athletics certificate that showed she had once been a county sprint champion, another to show that she reached Grade 8 in her piano exams and a photograph (,when I was a student') of her holding aloft a trophy, surrounded by people clapping. 'I was an all-rounder,' Dr Hunter laughed and Reggie said, 'You still are, Dr H.'

There were photographs on the noticeboard that charted Dr Hunter's life, some of Sadie over the years, and lots of the baby, of course, as well as one ofDr and Mr Hunter together, laughing in the glare of foreign sunshine. The rest of the noticeboard was a medley ofshopping lists and recipes (Sheila's Chocolate Brownies) and messages that Dr Hunter had left to herself -Remember to tell Reggie that Jo
e
Jingles is cancelled on Monday or Practice meeting changed to Fri PM. All the appointment cards were pinned there too, for the dentist, the hairdresser, the optician. Dr Hunter wore spectacles for driving, they made her look even smarter than she was. Reggie was supposed to wear spectacles but on her they had the opposite effect, making her look like a complete numpty, so she tended only to wear them when there was no one else around. The baby and Dr Hunter didn't count, Reggie could be herself with them, right down to the spectacles.

There were a couple ofbusiness cards on the noticeboard as well
,
stuck up by Mr Hunter on returning from 'working lunches', bu
t
really it was Dr Hunter's noticeboard.

A woman had come to see Dr Hunter yesterday afternoon. Sh
e
rang the doorbell two minutes after Dr Hunter came home an
d
Reggie had wondered if she had been parked nearby, waiting for D
r
Hunter to arrive.

Reggie, the baby balanced on her hip, led her into the kitchen an
d
went to tell Dr Hunter, who had gone upstairs to get changed ou
t
of the black suit she always wore for work. When Reggie came bac
k
downstairs the woman was examining the noticeboard in a way tha
t
Reggie thought was too presumptuous for a stranger. The woma
n
looked a bit like Dr Hunter, same dark hair that skimmed he
r
shoulders, same slim build, a bit taller. She was wearing a black suit too. She wasn't the Avon lady, that was for sure. Reggie wondered if she would ever have a life where she got to wear a black suit.