CHAPTER ELEVEN

THAT EVENING Grace went home to her flat in Stockbridge and prepared herself a dinner of fried cod’s roe accompanied by salad and mustard potatoes. Jamie had shown her how to make mustard potatoes, which he said went particularly well with fish, and which were very easy to prepare. “Boil the potatoes, then add butter, chives—if you have them—and a bit of mustard,” he said. “That’s all you need to do. Delicious.”

The potatoes went well with the tinned roe and with the salad, too, over which Grace had sprinkled pine nuts and sliced black olives. A small glass of New Zealand white wine, from a half-case that Isabel had given to her on her last birthday, which she had carefully husbanded since then, completed the meal. Grace was frugal: The pine nuts were an extravagance, but the olives came from a dented can from a special shelf at the supermarket where slightly damaged products were sold at less than half price. “I have Aberdonian blood in me,” she once explained to Isabel. “A grandfather on one side, and a grandmother on the other. They knew how to be careful with what little money they had, I can tell you. Have you heard of ‘tatties and a pass’?”

Isabel had not, and Grace explained: “In the days when meat was a real treat, the children had to hold back at the table. People thought that the father needed it more than anybody else because he was doing the heavy work. Ploughing. Going down the pits or whatever.”

“And he often was,” said Isabel. “Though women did more than their fair share of back-breaking work.”

Grace did not disagree. “True, but that’s the way things were in those days. So they gave the children potatoes and they were allowed to pass them over the pot containing the meat. That gave their tatties a whiff of meat. Tatties and a pass, you see. They weren’t allowed to dip them into the stew.”

Grace did not apologise for her Aberdonian frugality. Envelopes were reused, the name and address of the original recipient having a label pasted over it and the back flap being rejuvenated with glue made out of flour and water. Grace disapproved of the glue that Isabel bought for the children to use when making paper sculptures. “Nothing wrong with flour and water,” she said. “It’s much cheaper in the long run.”

Now, with cod’s roe, salad and potatoes finished and not a crumb remaining of the oatcake and cheese that constituted the second course, Grace drained the last drops of her half glass of Marlborough Sounds Sauvignon Blanc. Glancing at her watch, she saw that she had a full half hour to kill before she made her way up the hill to the Masonic Hall in Thistle Street where her psychic group, the Second Circle of Light, met every other week. Grace had only recently joined the Second Circle of Light, having drifted away from the spiritualist group she had attended for some years. This new group was smaller than her previous one, thus allowing participants more direct access to the invited medium. And the mediums invited to the Second Circle of Light, she thought, were somehow fresher and more innovative, and more likely to come up with communications of interest. At the previous meeting, there had been a frisson of excitement when the medium, who had travelled down to Edinburgh from Inverness for the séance, revealed that Mary, Queen of Scots had been present, although only briefly, and had indicated that she would have something to say about the murder of her secretary, Rizzio, but would keep this disclosure for a subsequent occasion “when she was less busy.” This had caused a buzz of excited chatter; to make contact with Mary was quite a coup, and her conversation would surely be considerably more interesting than the usual, rather mundane traffic from the other side.

She spent the half hour before her departure doing her ironing. She did not mind ironing, as it gave her the opportunity to think about the events of the day and plan the week ahead. There was to be a visit to her cousin in Falkirk—probably that Friday—and there would be a lot to discuss on that occasion. They would have to discuss what to do about an aunt of theirs who was needing a bit more care but was unwilling to go into a residential home. The cousin was a school administrator and knew how to make arrangements: She would sort it out, thought Grace, but they would have to tread carefully in view of their aunt’s pride.

That did not take long to think about, and Grace was then able to reflect on her lunch with Jamie and the rather unexpected turn that their conversation had taken. It was all Isabel’s fault, Grace felt: Isabel was constantly getting mixed up in the affairs of others, and although she seemed to get away with it most of the time, sooner or later she would come unstuck. The source of the problem, Grace thought, was guilt—Isabel felt guilty because she had money—it was as simple as that. If she didn’t have it, then she wouldn’t have to justify her existence by creating tasks for herself. If she had an ordinary job and an ordinary house, then she wouldn’t have to apologise for her good fortune. She was not lazy; Grace thought, in fact, that Isabel worked rather too hard on occasions. And that Review of hers seemed to be a bottomless pit, with all the bills she had to pay and all the prima donna authors she had to placate—those tiresome people who had nothing better to do than write articles about what we should or should not do. They, she noted, didn’t do anything most of the time, but they still thought they had the right to lecture the world in general. That awful Professor Lettuce, for instance, in all his pomposity—and that creepy Christopher Dove: They gave philosophy a bad name, as far as Grace was concerned. Unlike Aristotle, about whom Isabel occasionally talked, and whom Grace imagined quite clearly, and of whom she was inclined to approve. He would have been a distinguished-looking man, she decided, with a very courteous manner; the sort of man who always got to his feet when somebody entered the room. He would have a slightly distant air, as if he was really somewhere else altogether; Greece, perhaps. She could see herself having tea with Aristotle in Isabel’s sitting room, telling him that Isabel would be back from the supermarket shortly and would be so pleased to see that he had dropped in. She thought he would probably prefer Earl Grey tea to their ordinary Assam, but he would never say anything, of course, if you gave him tea that he did not really like. Yes, Aristotle would be easy to entertain—unlike Immanuel Kant, whom Isabel occasionally invoked. Isabel had told her about Kant’s scrupulous punctuality, and that had not endeared him to Grace. “The citizens of Königsberg could set their watches by him,” Isabel had said. “He always went off for his walk at precisely the same hour and returned at exactly the same time every day.” He would have been fussy, Grace decided, and also very dull to listen to. She pictured herself being followed round the house by Kant while she tried to make the beds and do the vacuuming. He would drone on and on and it would exhaust her. It would be impossible to be married to Immanuel Kant, she thought, although there may well have been some poor woman who was in that position and who had, no doubt, borne it with fortitude. Aristotle’s wife was more difficult to place. She might have been a fairly racy sort, rather too glamorous for somebody like Aristotle, who, being concerned with higher things, would put up with her flirting with the young men in her husband’s academy or the man who brought the olive oil round to the house. She might even be the sort of woman whose eye might fall on somebody like Christopher Dove.

Grace shuddered as she thought of Dove, who looked like a fair-haired version of that actor who played Dracula in the old black-and-white films, whatever his name was. Yes, him: And he might easily have been called Christopher Dove, which she had always felt was a very sinister name. She could not imagine what it would be like to be in the same room as him. She went further and imagined what it would be like to be married to either of them—to have Lettuce pontificating over the breakfast table or Christopher Dove slouching about in his pyjamas…It was a frightening thought. Actually, being married to any man was not something that Grace liked to think about too much. Oh, it was necessary, of course; sex, as one of Grace’s friends had once observed, is here to stay. And if it involved the right sort of man, there was something to be said for it. Jamie, for instance…but then he was already taken and one should not think about men who were already taken—that was something that Grace’s mother had drummed into her before she left home. “Find out whether a man is taken,” she warned. “There are plenty of men who pretend they’re free, and they aren’t. Don’t even look at those men, Grace. Just say, ‘No thank you.’ And if they persist, tell them that you look forward to meeting their wives. That stops them in their tracks most of the time.”

The pile of ironing was not large, and Grace slowed down, taking particular care with the pleats of a favourite blouse. Her thoughts had drifted, and she now found herself thinking of what had happened that afternoon, when, after her sandwich with Jamie, she had set off to collect Charlie and Magnus from school. Grace usually did the school walk when Isabel had a printer’s deadline looming, as was now the case, with only a couple of days remaining before all the copy for the next issue had to be dispatched. She enjoyed the task, as it gave her a chance to see what was going on in the busy purlieus of the school. The two boys also enjoyed seeing her, and would vie with each other for her attention as they regaled her with stories of what had happened in school. The school day, it seemed, was punctuated with incidents of high drama. Alliances were made, and broken; episodes of injustice and unfairness were legion; good behaviour stars were won and lost; and in between all this, the demands of education were occasionally observed.

It was while they were walking back, and about to cross Colinton Road, that Magnus suddenly let out a piercing yell. The two boys had been standing beside her, waiting for the pedestrian crossing light, and for a few moments Grace’s attention had been distracted. There had been a steady stream of traffic, and she was looking to see whether a large delivery van, which had been lumbering down the road, was going to stop for the signal. It was at this point that Magnus’s protest was raised.

Grace looked down sharply. Magnus had raised his arms and was covering his eyes, as if in pain. Charlie, standing beside him, was looking fixedly ahead, as if indifferent to the disturbance beside him.

“Magnus!” exclaimed Grace. “What’s wrong?”

Magnus lowered his hands. His eyes were streaming with tears.

For a moment or two, Grace imagined that he had been stung by something. There were bees about—she had seen one a few minutes earlier—and it may have alighted on him. Now she bent down to comfort him. Charlie moved from foot to foot, waiting impatiently.

“Charlie bit me,” Magnus wailed, waving his right hand, the evidence, in front of Grace.

Grace examined the hand. One of the fingers looked a bit red, but the skin was unbroken and it was hard to tell. She turned to Charlie, who did not flinch, but lowered his eyes slightly, avoiding her gaze. It was this lowering of the eyes that in Grace’s mind constituted an admission of guilt.

But if that were an admission, it was quickly withdrawn. “I didn’t bite him,” Charlie muttered. “He bit me. I just pushed him because he’s bad.”

Grace turned to Magnus. “Did you bite Charlie, Magnus?”

This question was greeted with outrage and a scream of denial. Grace looked back at Charlie. “He says he didn’t.”

“Magnus is a big liar,” said Charlie. “He tells fibs all the time.”

Grace drew in her breath. There was no doubt in her mind: Charlie had bitten Magnus. The older boy’s studied coolness was just too much. Had he been innocent, he would have refuted the allegation straight away, and with feeling. False accusation always brings a note of anger in the response it draws. He had done it.

Grace wagged a finger at Charlie. “You listen to me, Charlie. If you bite Magnus—even a little bite—you’ll be sorry. Do you hear me?”

Charlie looked away, affecting indifference.

“Are you listening to me?” she repeated.

Again, there was indifference.

Grace made up her mind. “Now,” she said. “You tell me this: How would you feel if somebody bigger than you bit you?”

He shrugged. The pedestrian crossing light had turned green, and now was red again.

“Don’t care,” said Charlie defiantly, adding, “You smell.”

Something moved within Grace. Deep in her memory, overlaid by the passage of years, a moment of raw hurt surfaced. She was back in the playground, in her tenth year, and she was being mocked by a small band of girls, her enemies of the time, who ridiculed her for the threadbare school uniform she was obliged to wear, a handed-down hand-me-down that proclaimed her parents’ straitened circumstances—there was no money; there never was—and the girls who teased her had clothes that had belonged to nobody but them, and expensive ribbons; and one of them, her principal tormentor, a pigtailed girl with a retroussé nose, had jeered and called out, in that sing-song tone that is the hallmark of children’s taunts the world over, “Smelly Grace in her smelly dress.” And that came back now, suddenly, unexpectedly.

Grace grabbed Charlie’s hand, on impulse, and gave it a nip with her teeth. It was not a strong nip, but it was a nip. Releasing the hand, she said, “There, you see. You don’t like it, do you?”

Charlie stared at Grace, his eyes wide. Then he let out a howl of protest. Magnus looked on, equally surprised.

“So that settles that,” said Grace. “If you bite anybody, you’ll be bitten back.” She paused. “So now, let’s get home and we can have some bread and honey and start behaving like civilised beings once more.” The children would forget about it. They never thought about these things for long; they were always having little spats with one another and then, the next moment, everything was back to normal and sweetness and light were restored.

They walked back largely in silence, with only the occasional sniffle from Charlie, whose pride had been severely dented by the summary justice meted out on the street. As they approached the house, though, he looked up at Grace and said, “I’m going to tell Mummy you bit me.”

Grace stopped. She was already regretting her impetuous response. She had never raised a hand to the children—they were not hers to discipline, anyway—and now she had bitten one of them. She could hardly believe it of herself. It had been an ill-thought-out, knee-jerk response, the product of a painful memory and a sudden urge to punish. She had betrayed Isabel’s trust. She may have meant well; she may have thought it necessary to teach him a simple lesson about life—that bad behaviour had painful consequences. But you did not do it this way. You did not bite children. You did not.

Grace panicked. She would lose her job—in ignominy. She would be utterly shamed. She could not allow that to happen, and yet there seemed to be no way in which this disastrous outcome could be averted. Unless…Bending down, she whispered to Charlie, “I’m very sorry, Charlie. Let’s just forget about what happened.”

The boy glared at her, but said nothing. They finished the journey in silence, which was only interrupted by a muttered “Witch!” from Charlie, but not so loud that anybody could hear him.