Authors: Candia McWilliam
‘Here it is,’ said Muriel. She stood back from the rail of one of the tiny chapels, each the size of a desk, and traced along a column a row of merry-making skeletons. ‘The bit they never let you see. More
danse banale
than
danse macabre
to me, though not so to you. The bones seem to me the least of it. Quite smart really. Let me sit alone for a bit.’
Alec took Lorna down the stair into the crypt, and they stood together outside the cell of the lepers. He said to her the hard words he had seen cut in a lintel in the museum, the letters clean and whiskered with the cursive energy of the chisel: ‘
Abbas
,
Episcopus
,
Princeps
.
Pulvis
,
Umbra
,
Nihil
.’ He sounded frightened and thrilled together.
She knew only the echoes of the words but was too shrewd for him. She knew the flavour of gloom and glory was too easily sucked.
‘I love you also,’ she said, her pale eyes in their dark sockets feverish with health.
Sure enough, there was rain to meet them as they left the chapel and walked towards the car.
‘Shall we find somewhere to dry ourselves, now?’ asked Lorna, though she had it planned. Muriel was leaning back in her seat, eyes shut.
‘Do you hear anything?’ she asked them.
‘No.’
‘The usual. Wipers, engine.’
‘Your answers distinguish you. Alec is idle.’
‘And I am dull.’
‘No, you are truthful. Do you wish to hear something? The noise in my head is gone. I left it behind at Rosslyn.’
The tinnitus that had tired her with its whine, perforating the silence she wanted, had left her at last like an earwig taking its leave.
‘Can you walk if we park in Charlotte Square? Or will I drop you?’
‘Better the walk, today.’
Once they had parked the car back at the peak of town, tucked in below the stepped pavement, the three of them set off towards Princes Street, past the linked rhythmic frontages of the grand square, with their princely but rational abundance of glass shining from raised lunettes like brows over some of the plain high windows. In the octagonal garden that filled the square within, trees tossed wide sections of green and showed grey beneath. From the far side of the square came the buzzing sound of stone being cleaned, the persistent trickle of strong solutions over flayed detail and harmed subtlety.
But the square was still an almost perfect sequence of confident order, free of self-importance, enlightened, accommodating.
The three of them made it to the Chocolate House. The Johnsonian name was misleading. The place was as up-to-the-minute as the grey-and-primrose Terylene button-down smocks of the waitresses, the only spot in town to serve hot mocktails and small savouries all day. The floors were pierced at intervals to admit the penetration of iron cocoa palms, built at blistering expense by a gang from Clydeside with experience in tropical themes. The wallpaper showed cocoa pods in cross-section.
Hot chocolate came in cups to be set in stainless-steel holders and with heatproof straws that did not guarantee a heatproof mouth. In the roof large carved pods were tied to the rigid fronds of the palms that appeared to brace the flimsy restaurant. On each floor of the Chocolate House a crucible of chocolate breathed out steam. Tinny tubes and electrical whisks modified the beverages accordingly. A hum of sugar-powered conversation filled the three floors.
Lorna found a table between a palm trunk and an old woman staring with vigilant dislike at a younger man. They shared an ice without touching long spoons. When something notable loomed, such as a cherry or a stratum of syrup, the woman held back and allowed the man to do his worst. Then she regarded him with an expression of satisfied distaste. Her scarf was the pelt of some animal with six legs and two adjacent heads. On her locally woven shopping basket was sewn in raffia the untruth ‘Sunny Italy’.
The sugar came in jars with beaks that dispensed suitable quantities. At tables all about were ladies who could take the day broken into small pieces only. Muriel knew her good fortune was not to be one of these. She was never alone in the way a more apprehendably feminine woman of her time might have found herself. Her appearance had never distracted her from life into dissatisfaction. A mural of toiling harvesters of the cocoa pod struck her with its impracticality. So merry were the pod-gatherers at their labour that they looked not at the pods and the activities involved in their harvest and processing but out at the sippers of cocoa, merry smiles filling their faces with bare teeth.
The bitter smell, thought Muriel, the bitter smell is what I remember of chocolate when we took it in Mexico with Mother and Father.
‘I’ll have tea, if I may,’ she said to Lorna, who had nevertheless been right to bring her here. It was full of young people and even children, though the general tone was a little too fast for the main body of Edinburgh motherhood.
‘Tea, then, please, for two, and a Freezing Hot here.’ She indicated Alec by letting her hand drop on to his. He started. The woman at the next table disapproved, checked to see whether the gaze of her son was with her own and then, seeing that it was, bestowed a long squeezing gaze of tender indulgence upon Lorna and Alec.
She was going to be denied every mother’s rightful reward, a daughter-in-law. Even that ugly old besom – she looked at Muriel – had someone to punish. Grey-headed, the daughter-in-law was, she noticed, conning Lorna for other marks; the old woman must be a force to reckon with.
The Castle’s hard hem was to be seen through the window. Drumming and the crack of boots came and bent away under a cloud of pipe music that lingered after it ceased to be audible, become part of the ear’s fluctuations and balances as sea legs stay with you back on shore.
‘A grown man and you can’t finish an ice,’ said the mother at the next table. Her son would not eat the last cherry for some reason she made no sense of. He had seen her put it into her mouth and extract it whole once more, never noticing what she did, as a woman will pull out her chewing gum to kiss a man and put it in again; but this was the other way about.
Freezing Hot was an item from a part of the dessert menu entitled, ‘And now let Us tempt You’; the ice-cream was ginger flavour, the hot bit. It came with two wafers.
Alec observed the man and the woman at the next table. Only between a mother and her son could good manners have offered such offence. He saw the son take up and emphasise each unconscious gesture of the mother. The isolation of the two and their sentence one to the other was set and ingrown as some unkind graft of skin. Unless she died soon he would have to make his own way out, that son.
‘I am not ready for it yet,’ said the mother, ‘but when my time comes I know you will see your way to doing the right thing.’
He did not know what she was talking about. Nor did she. She sometimes spoke like this to pass the time, in the unsurprising formulae of domestic speech. From her son’s response to whatever it was that she said, his state of mind might be gathered. For example, had he said, ‘Oh no, mother, you’ll live a long time yet,’ she would know he contemplated murder. If he were to reply, ‘Things can be perfectly comfortable for you for a long while yet,’ she would know he had in mind a retirement home where they would feed her on kitekat and ground glass.
She repeated a sentence she had heard at another table, to check whether her son was listening at all: ‘Miss Livingston-Learmont is of the old school and makes sure never to take tea indoors.’ Perhaps she would find out from her son the meaning of this mysterious pronouncement.
Her son said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know her.’
The mother resumed her staring match with the cherry in the depths of the sundae glass.
Lorna and Muriel each took a bit of Alec’s ice. He loved seeing them spoon it up. The happiness shed by small treats had never bloomed quite freely for his mother, who would not please herself at all for fear of the wolf within. No appetite aroused was safe; she feared consumption of the mildest sort as though it were its namesake, a disease that burnt you up. In consequence Alec had, and knew he had, a greedy, appetitive, streak. He had a first twitch towards quantity that filled him with a mouthwatering impulse to give in. Sometimes softness seemed so easy that it made sense until he contemplated its sad habits. Luxury had been to his mother an abstract noun, a vice the colour of seamy finery. It began with arising from your bed when you wished and ended God knew where.
Very likely the Chocolate House.
The last place Lorna had taken Muriel Bruce that first afternoon of her return from her brother’s death had been the establishment of a milliner, up on the lateral ridgeback boulevard of George Street, among shops selling ironmongery made with the care of jewellery, selling ladies’ gowns and school uniforms, and all presenting themselves as though these transactions were as much of a social pleasure for the assistants as they were for the patrons of the establishments.
The hat they bought went into her last home with Muriel Bruce. Mr James the milliner took his time looking at the face that had improved with age, becoming undeceived and open where it had been apologetic. He told no lies.
‘I do not need it to last, Mr James,’ said Muriel.
‘I rarely consider lifespan when it comes to hats. It is so short.’ It was clear he meant the lifespan of hats. That of humans interested him less. It was an age of time. It was like asking a butterfly collector to watch the teeth of a crocodile grow in.
‘Something cheerful and not over-useful.’ Muriel looked around the room. On pegs like giant pins perched hats you would not see in a street unless they should be flying along looking for a flock of parakeets in which to hide.
The eventual hat was not much, a wisp, in fact, just a kind of lettuce made of black net, dotted in places with beauty spots of plush, also black. The effect was Edwardian, elongated, quizzical. It took three weeks to make, during which time Mr James sought and found a hatpin of Whitby jet that was cut like a star. He threw it in with the hat, a festive mourning gift.
The stairs at Nelson Street began to be too much for even the few journeys Muriel was obliged to make. Lorna had given up her room in the flat behind the Parisian curlicues of iron, and was living with Alec.
The two of them set to finding a place for Muriel to live. The Infirmary gave them addresses. They visited each recommended home together, without Muriel, and came away in the first three cases glad they had not brought her.
She knew of the plan, mentioning it often as though inoculating herself.
‘What sort of old lady is she?’ asked the keepers of the first last home. ‘Cheerful, friendly, down-to-earth, incontinent?’
‘Oh yes,’ lied Lorna desperately before the question’s end. Then she was glad to have bothered her complacent questioner.
The second place was full of whimpers. There were no men, who make old people’s homes smell but also give the old ladies something to live for beyond spite. On the walls were strung messages of Life Beautiful, penned in the prose of girlish serfdom and laminated. The bathroom contained an old woman being washed when they were shown around. When Alec withdrew to save her feelings, the woman sponging her said, ‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know the difference.’ By then Lorna was out too. The confiscation of privacy seemed to kill the old ladies more quickly than widowhood and bitter winters.
The third home was in the country, by Gogar. It had been a real house; that was in its favour. The house was a central octagon with two short but graceful wings, faintly curved.
Within the octagon the space had been partitioned like a cake. The soundproofing consisted of softboard. The place was like a hellish carousel. From one room came the cry of an abandoned woman, without once stopping except to collect air to start again, ‘Oh God, get me out of here, Oh let me die, please, God, Oh God, get me out of here, let me die.’
‘They stop it after a bit,’ said an orderly, fixing the lid on to a beaker. An old woman with a hairband was rushing around calling, ‘I love you, I love you,’ now in the voice of a child, now in a hot voice that chilled. In each of these places Alec was bursting to pee but could not. He was moved by the unfairness of the paraphernalia from second childhood producing none of the fondness the kit of a baby evokes. The fragility of the old women in their triangular rooms, the old men kept away from temptation in the wings, seemed to interest no one, to hold no use and to exact no honour. Age had one thing above all other states, its abundance of the past, but the past no longer had a place.
Muriel grew ill. She wanted to go to a place where she might lie in a bed and look out on water. In the end, Alec asked his father and Jean if she could come to their home to die. The move shook some life out of her, and the rest she surrendered quietly one evening. The hatbox with its weightless contents was under the bed. The stuffed Dunvegan had not made the journey. Alec had set up a sprinkler mechanism on the garden hose. It was a kind of view over water, to be carried to a window to see water fan-dancing among lupins and over shining grass.
‘I see a bird come for me. At the window.’ Alec’s heart stopped at the words. He looked down at Muriel. He wanted to remember this time in which he either saw the Holy Ghost or saw someone who saw it. When he turned he saw what the woman herself and her life should have led him to expect, a seagull, watching for food to snatch. It was a bird of appetite, not of the spirit.