Edinburgh Excursion Read online

  ‘Not the way my feet are tonight, they shouldn’t! I bought these slip-ons second-hand from a girl at Martha’s. They’re half a size too big and right now sheer bliss.’ I took Bassy’s card out of my shoulder-bag. ‘How do you suppose I get to the Royal Mile? I meant to ask Catriona.’

  ‘Search me.’

  ‘I’ll find a cop. See you.’

  ‘Have a good knees-up!’

  The only long mirror in our flat was on a wall in the hall. I stopped to look at myself on the way out and wished I hadn’t. Though I had intentionally dressed to boost Bassy’s image, the ego I was really trying to please was John’s. He had always said that with my colouring I should only wear black or blue, and that if he ever saw me in a maxi or with my hair up after we were married he’d divorce me. He said it all during those eleven months. And then after five weeks’ deafening silence he rang me. ‘Darling,’ he said, ‘you do understand the last thing I’d ever want to do is hurt you?’

  I had to say something. I said I understood.

  I nearly went back to my room to change the lot. I tried to kid myself it was lack of energy and not moral courage that prevented me; then immediately proved myself a cowardly liar by charging down the stairs as if the house were on fire. It was just possible nothing would have happened had my shoes been a better fit. Only just, as I was tired, moving carelessly, and wallowing in self-pity. When my left shoe shot off on the last flight I pitched forward after it. If the man coming in through the front door had reacted less quickly I could have had the nasty accident I was asking for.

  He seemed to grab me in mid-air, and though slightly built and only about three inches taller than myself, somehow he withstood the momentum of my five-seven and nine stones. We rocked dangerously, but remained on our feet. I recognized him as the man I had seen at the station whilst I was still in his arms. I was too winded to wonder what he was doing in our hall, though not to appreciate what he had just done for me.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said breathlessly, ‘thanks very much. I could’ve killed myself.’

  ‘Possibly, if not probably.’ He was as breathless as myself, which was hardly surprising since I had landed on his chest. ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘Just shook up.’ I moved back and sat on the stairs. ‘I hope I haven’t cracked your ribs. Are you all right?’

  ‘Quite, thank you.’ He straightened his tie and smoothed his lamentable hair-cut. ‘Did your ankle turn over? Was that why you slipped?’

  I showed him my shoeless foot. ‘You didn’t see my shoe beating me to it?’

  ‘I was aware the air was suddenly filled with flying objects, but being a trifle surprised, I’m afraid I forgot to observe the finer details.’ His voice was deep and very precise. ‘You’re sure you’re not hurt?’ He looked beyond me up the stairs. ‘Are you staying or visiting here? Is there anyone you would like me to fetch to you?’

  ‘No thanks. I’m fine. I’m just off to visit my brother when I get my breath back.’

  ‘Sit there,’ he said, ‘whilst I retrieve your possessions.’

  My bag had fallen with me and emptied itself all over the hall floor. I watched him collecting my lipstick, eyeshadow, compact, keys, scissors, postcards, through a haze of self-fury, and self-disgust. I thought of the patients I had seen all day, of accident wards in Martha’s, and how very easily I could now have been en route for one with a broken back or fractured skull. So the man I loved had stopped loving me? So that was tough. And so was real illness, or accidents caused by other people’s carelessness. An accident caused by one’s own childish carelessness was only excusable if one was a child.

  ‘This seems to be all. Would you care to check?’

  I blinked and discovered he was offering me my bag. ‘Sorry. I was in coma. Thanks.’ I gave my bag a cursory glance. ‘Seems all here. Oh!’ I had seen Bassy’s card. ‘Do you have any idea how I can get from here to the Royal Mile?’

  He had a long, sensitive mouth that was contradicted by the toughness of his jaw and in his face. Seeing him close to, having now had a good look at him, I understood why my subconscious had bothered to register his face without my realizing it. Pre-John, all my boyfriends had had light-brown hair, rather plain, solid faces, and outsize jaws. For other reasons Bassy had always referred to them as my ‘Untouchables’.

  His mouth twitched upward at one corner, but whether that was a nervous tic or he was fighting the frivolous urge to smile I could not tell as his slightly hooded hazel eyes were impassive. They were also by far his most attractive feature. ‘I believe I can direct you. Where precisely do you wish to go?’

  I gave him Bassy’s address. ‘Only one sweet-shop?’

  He smiled rather attractively. ‘I’ll jot it down for you.’

  A couple of minutes later we went outside together. There was a largish blue car parked by the front door, and getting out of the front passenger door a girl in a silk coat the exact shade of my sweater. She could not have been my sister, but as we had the same colouring, we could have got by as second cousins. ‘What’s the hold-up, Charlie?’

  She glanced at me curiously, but pleasantly. ‘You haven’t forgotten we’re late as it is?’

  ‘No. I’m sorry to delay you like this, Josephine. Merely a minor mishap.’ He nodded at me. ‘All well, now?’

  ‘Fine, thanks very much.’

  ‘Not at all.’ He turned back to the girl. ‘I’ll just go up and see if he’s left a message.’

  ‘Can’t you ring from my place, sweetie?’

  My bus arrived immediately I reached the stop he had marked on the map drawn on the torn-off back of an envelope. Jogging in my seat on the top deck, I wondered about his exact relationship with ‘Josephine’. From her voice and skirt-length she was English. That ‘my place’ showed they were not married. Sister? His educated voice held only a faint Scottish intonation, but he wasn’t English. Mistress? Not him. Even without that hair-cut and those turn-ups he’d respectable citizen stamped all over him. Official fiancée or about to be, or nothing.

  Then I found my purse was missing.

  A forgotten two bob in the bottom of my bag took care of my fare, if it did not solve the other question. I tossed it around. Not a man like that! Either he hadn’t noticed it on the hall floor or it was still in my room. A man like what? Where did I get the big idea I knew anything about men? Remember John?

  Suddenly I was damned if I’d remember John. I hadn’t a death-wish, but only by the grace of God and Charlie was I now in one piece. My map showed the next stop was mine. I got off the bus belligerently and breathed deeply. I had been in Edinburgh over twenty-four hours, but that was when I first saw it.

  Across the cobbles the lines of High Kirk of St Giles were uncompromisingly grim and strangely impressive. Everywhere I looked were tall, cramped buildings, grey as the cobbles, grey as the thick clouds hurtling inland from the Firth of Forth over a paler grey sky. The total, and to me unexpected, effect in face of all that grey was one of austere beauty. I forgot my purse and walked up the hill in the wrong direction before drifting back reluctantly towards the right turning I wanted. Drifting with me were quiet posses of elderly American couples, the husbands in neat light suits with very white hair and their expensively dowdy wives with tired feet. The evening rush-hour traffic raced as wildly over the cobbles as the traffic in London, but the drivers had much nicer manners. The two that nearly mowed me down when I crossed to the sweet-shop both raised their hats when they missed me.

  The second-hand bookshop was locked for the night. A door at the side was open and led straight on to steep stone stairs. I went up. Another door, and Bassy’s name heading the three others on the card. I rang twice, then tried the door. It was unlocked. ‘Bassy? Anyone home?’

  That door opened into a large room that looked as if it were the stockroom of the shop below, and stocked by a drunk. A note was fixed to the mirror above the book-piled hearth. ‘Alix, sorry had to go to meeting. Food in kitchen. Make yourself at home. Back around se
ven. Bassy.’

  I shifted enough books off the sofa to get my feet up, kicked off my shoes, and closed my eyes. It could have been five minutes, five hours, or five days later that someone shook me and a man’s voice asked me to please wake up.

  I surfaced slowly through waves of sleep and was just remembering where I was when I was shaken again. ‘Relax, Bassy! I’m awake!’ I reached up with my eyes still shut, flung my arms round his neck, and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank God you’ve taken off that repulsive beard!’ I opened my eyes and nearly had a coronary when I saw who I was embracing. ‘My God!’ I leapt off the sofa. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Returning your purse. I found it on the hall floor after you’d gone. As you’d mentioned this address, it seemed sensible to try and deliver it in person. Had you not been here I’d have taken it to the police.’ He was smoothing his hair again and looking much more like a Charles than a Charlie. Charlie was human. His present expression was reminding me more than a little of St Giles. ‘I must apologize for walking in unannounced. I rang several times. Excuse me.’ He shifted the sofa and handed me the shoe I had been trying to reach with one foot.

  ‘Thanks.’ I sat down to replace both. ‘I’m sorry I kissed you like that. Traumatic experience for you. I thought you were my brother.’

  After a deep and rather peculiar silence he said he quite understood and produced my purse. ‘Do you know how much money this contains?’

  ‘Roughly, four pounds fifteen.’

  ‘Would you mind checking that?’

  I hesitated, then saw his point. ‘Sure. Yes. All here, and thanks again …’

  ‘Alix, my angel!’ Bassy was in the doorway. He wore a psychedelic donkey-jacket, faded yellow cords, and his hair and beard were longer and tattier than ever. ‘Sorry about that something meeting.’ Then he noticed Charlie, did a double-take at his suit, and switched to his alter and reasonably civilized ego. ‘I say, do forgive me. Long time no see Alix and so forth. You’ll be a friend of hers. How do you do? Sebastian Hurst. London, England.’

  ‘Charles Linsey. Edinburgh, Scotland.’ They shook hands. And Charles Linsey explained why he had come.

  ‘I should’ve guessed,’ said Bassy. ‘That girl’s a menace. Takes after our old man. He’s left travellers’ cheques and passports all over Europe and the Middle East. Great problem to my mother. Can I offer you a beer? I think we’ve got some somewhere. If not, milk? We always have milk. Hold it! We may have some gin. Gin?’

  ‘Thank you, but I should be on my way.’ The room was now packed with Bassy’s equally colourful and hairy chums. ‘Goodnight, Miss Hurst, Mr Hurst, gentlemen.’

  There was silence until Bassy checked the stairs. He shut the door. ‘You lot thinking what I’m thinking?’ They all nodded. ‘Don’t know his face. You?’

  A small, dark-haired boy with sideboards, chin-fringe, and bad acne said, ‘Like it reads blurred, man.’

  ‘He’s a don or whatever they get called here?’ I thought of our parents’ academic friends. ‘So clean and neat?’ Five Englishmen and one Welshman agreed sadly it could happen in Edinburgh.

  Later, Bassy walked me home and we talked of John. He said, ‘I knew you were hung-up on the creep, but I always thought he’d ditch you the moment a better proposition turned up. Something thrown you?’

  ‘Something.’

  The girls were still up, and he came in to meet them. We told them about Charles Linsey. Gemmie was very amused and Catriona very shocked. ‘What if he wasn’t merely calling here? He could be’ ‒ she looked upwards nervously ‒ ‘Big Brother. And you kissed him!’

  Gemmie clasped her hands. ‘Ten bob a week off the rent for a start, eh, Alix? Seeing what we get paid, get cracking, lass! Get up them stairs!’

  Catriona’s face matched her hair. ‘It is quite amusing in its way.’

  I said, ‘If he is.’

  Bassy went into our hall and returned with the telephone directory. ‘He is.’

  Chapter Two

  Mrs Duncan drove past on her way back from lunch and drew up ahead. ‘What’s the problem?’

  I hitched my bike more securely against the kerb and went over to her. It was the last day of our first week and we were now making selected calls unescorted. We had been given our separate areas, and Mrs Duncan worked the one adjoining mine. ‘Have I got this address wrong? This new man back from hospital.’ I handed her a blue card. ‘How can a burn be a street?’

  ‘This is right. The burn dried up years ago, but they kept the name when they built the street over the bed. So old Donald Fleming’s back? Ah, I know him well, and so will you if you’ve this area long. He’s no equal as an unhandy man about the house.’

  ‘That how he cracked his knee?’

  ‘Aye. Dropping off a ladder, painting the outside of his house. He put a nail through his hand when mending the kitchen chair, and the time before his fist through the window he’d just glazed. And that’s but this year! Still, it keeps him happy in his retirement, so one can but hope he’ll not kill himself in the process. Which reminds me ‒’

  She sorted through my cards and took out a pink one. (Male, blue; female, pink.) ‘When you get to giving young Mrs MacRae her anti-anaemic injection this afternoon, will you ask her to oblige me by remembering those twins she’s carrying are due in seven weeks? I’d a word with her mother this morning. Yesterday the daft lassie was up top of a table distempering her spare-bedroom ceiling. At her size!’ She read my mind, despite my blank expression. ‘Yes, my dear,’ she added drily, ‘I’m aware that aside from this anaemia she’s a strong lassie, the right age for child-bearing, and that birth is a natural function. So is death. You’ve seen a baby die?’ I winced, involuntarily. ‘You tell her to watch herself, Miss Hurst. Cheerio just now!’

  Mr Fleming was a sturdy little man with bushy iron-grey hair and a static expression that reminded me briefly of Charles Linsey. He was sitting by a blazing open fire with his injured leg propped on the piano-stool. The sitting-room was very warm, highly polished, and all the geraniums in the row of pots on the bay windowsill were in bloom.

  Mrs Fleming was very thin, very neat, and directly I opened my mouth very apprehensive. She hovered at my elbow and checked with an experienced eye the contents of my sterile-dressing pack and my surgical technique as I dressed her husband’s leg. ‘Mind you don’t throw out those wee tongs with the rest, lassie. They’ve to return to the Department for re-sterilizing. The dirty dressings may go in my kitchen boiler, but you’ll have to put the tinfoil dishes in my dustbin.’

  The kitchen was as highly polished as the best room. The dustbin gleamed like my tinfoil.

  I had my coat on again when she said, ‘You’ll be from England, Nurse?’

  ‘Yes.’ I smiled. ‘London.’

  ‘Do you hear that, Donald?’

  ‘Aye,’ said Mr Fleming, ‘I do.’

  I waited, expectantly, but they did not say anything else. They just looked at me. ‘Well’ I said, ‘goodbye for now. See you on Sunday, Mr Fleming.’

  ‘Cheerio,’ they said.

  About forty minutes later I cycled along an old engrimed row of two-up, two-down terraced houses. The MacRaes’ was third on the left and their front-door unlatched. I called, ‘Good afternoon, Mrs MacRae. May I come in? It’s Nurse Hurst.’

  ‘I knew that from your voice! You talk awful quaint, but I like it fine, Nurse! I’ll be down!’ Mrs MacRae’s voice was drowsy, and when she appeared at the top of the steep, narrow stairs her smock was crumpled. ‘I was taking a wee nap.’

  ‘Don’t bother to come down. I’ll come up.’

  She was nineteen and chubby, with cropped dark hair and dark eyes. She never had much colour, but seemed much paler than usual. She blamed the dumplings she had eaten for lunch. ‘Hamish was home as he’d to deliver a load up the way, so I’d a hot dinner ready. I’ve an awful weakness for dumplings, but they’ve no use for me.’ She caught her breath. ‘You see that? Heartburn! Terrible!’

 
I watched her, clinically. It could only be indigestion.

  ‘Why not go back to bed for your injection?’

  ‘You’ll think me awful lazy ‒ och! No more dumplings for me! Worse than the wee devils having a rave-up.’

  Suddenly she clutched the stair-rail with both hands. It was not a long pain, but whilst it lasted her stance and breathing were unmistakable. ‘Nurse? Och away!’ She clutched me. ‘Nurse!’

  There was only time to get her on her double-bed, put on my mask and an emergency pair of sterile gloves. The minute baby boy literally landed in my hands. His very red, wrinkled face was covered with fine down and grease, he flayed the air with arms no thicker and much shorter than my fountain-pen, and though his cry was a high, premature croak, it was a very good croak.

  ‘The two, Nurse?’

  ‘At the moment, just one perfect little boy. All right your end, duckie? Good girl. Lie still.’ I tore the wrapping off an entire roll of cotton-wool and enveloped the baby, keeping the wool well back from his face and making sure he had enough room beneath to expand his lungs. I added another ligature to his cord, and he tried to kick me in the face with microscopic legs. He was still shouting his head off. ‘Junior now looks more like a little Eskimo than a little Scotsman. I don’t think he approves of this world.’

  ‘He’s a terrible noisy wee devil! Nurse, you said he was all right?’ she insisted as every newly delivered woman I had ever known did at this particular moment.

  ‘Outwardly, perfect! Congratulations,’ I said slowly, as I was thinking fast. The baby needed an oxygenated incubator as soon as one could get here, but the house had no ’phone and the second twin might be about to appear. The first baby’s placenta had shot out after him and seemed intact, though I had not yet had time for a proper look. Mrs MacRae was not losing more than was normal, but at this stage after such a rapid delivery anything could happen. ‘Got any shawls handy? That drawer? Thanks.’ I tested the shawls against my face. They were dry. I swathed the baby. ‘How about a basket? Shopping or laundry? One with a flat bottom. Got one?’