No kimono-style dressing-gowns and baby-doll nighties on this ward.
She found the mirror, slipped it into her pocket, went back to the side ward and sat down, her eyes moving instinctively from bed to bed, four beds, all empty.
'Moira?'
All empty.
'Oh!' She spun round, her hair unravelling down below her shoulders.
He said, 'You've come then, eh?'
God help us, he was hanging over her… like bones in pyjamas.
'Mr Ca-'
What was holding him up? She'd seen his legs, his muscles, wasted, gone to jelly. Been in a wheelchair for weeks and weeks. They'd said to watch him, he might even die in the night, and here he was standing up, oh God, his lips all pulled back and frozen into a ric-rictus?
'Tarn…' trying to shout for the other nurse, but her voice was so dry the name just dropped out of her mouth like a piece chewing gum '… sin.' Hardly heard herself.
His eyes were far back in his head, black marbles, like the eyes had already died.
Then one of his hands reached out, it was all shrivelled and rigid, like a chicken's foot, and he started… he started playing with her hair, pulling it down and fingering it, looking down at it in his fingers, mumbling, Moira… Moira.
Eventually she managed to say, 'I'm not your wife, Mr…Mr Castle…'
But remembered Sister Murtry saying, 'Her name's Charlotte, I think.' And then, later, 'Come on, Charlotte, let's be having you, can't stay here all night. Not good for either of you.'
She couldn't move. The metal bars on the bed heads made hard shadows on the walls, the little ward was like a cage. If only Sister Murtry would come now, bustling in, short and dynamic. Nobody Sister Murtry couldn't handle.
Oh, God, this was the wrong job, she hated dying people, their stretched skin, their awful smell, especially this one – the damp stench of ripe, putrid earth (the grave?). She began to shiver and tried to stand up, drawing back, away from him, but there was nowhere to go, her bottom was pressed into the edge of the desk, and Mr Castle was still hanging over her like a skeleton in a rotting sack and smelling of wet earth.
How could he smell of earth, of outside?
'Tam… sin…' Her scream was a whisper, but her mouth was stretched wide as his greenish chickenfoot hand whipped out and seized her throat.
CHAPTER V
The scuffed sixteen-year-old Ovation guitar, with its fibreglass curves, was a comfort. Its face reflected the great fire blazing on the baronial hearth.
'Ladies of noble birth…' Adjusting the microphone. 'In those days, they didn't have too much of a say in it, when it came to husbands. This is… thumbing an A-minor, tweaking the top string up a fraction, '… this is the story of a woman who's found herself betrothed to a titled guy much younger than she is. However…' gliding over a C, 'I doubt if we're talking toy-boys, as we know them. This is like… nine or ten, right?'
Tuning OK. 'I mean, you know, there's a limit to the things you can get from a boy of nine or ten.'
No reaction. You bastard, Malcolm. And you, Rory McBain – one day you really will be sick.
'Anyway, she's stuck with this kid. And she's standing on the castle walls, watching him playing down below, working out the dispiriting mathematics of the situation and wondering if…'
Shuffling on the stool, tossing back the black wings of her hair, the weight of it down her back pulling her upright so that she could see the audience and the gleaming stag skulls all round. The walls of neatly dressed stone, with spotlit banners and tapestries. The black eye-holes in the skulls, and the eyes of the conference delegates looking, from five or so yards away, just as opaque and unmoving.
'Anyway, don't expect a happy ending, OK? This is a traditional song. You don't get many happy endings in traditional songs. It's called… 'Lang a-growin' '.'
The bastard McBain would have handled this better. For the sake of ethnic credibility, he'd do a couple of songs in the Gaelic, of which he understood scarcely a word. What she had these days was a different kind of credibility: sophistication, fancy nightclub ethnic, low and sultry vocals, folk tunes with a touch of jazz guitar, strictly rationed to what she could handle without fracturing a fingernail.
'He's young…' Hearing her own voice drifting vacuously on the air, the words like cigarette smoke. '… but he's daily… growin'…'
Over an hour ago, she'd called Lottie's number. A guy answered, obviously not the boy, Dic. The guy'd said Lottie was at the hospital in Manchester. Muffled voices in the background – this was a pub, right? She'd asked no more questions. She'd call back.
The hospital. In Manchester. Oh, hell.
The Great Hall was huge, the acoustics lousy. When the song was over, applause went pop-pop-pop like a battery of distant shotguns. The stags' heads gathered grimly below the ceiling, so many that the antlers looked to be tangled up.
'Splendid,' she heard the Earl call out magnanimously. How many wee staggies did you pop yourself, my lord, your grace, whatever? Maybe you invited members of the Royal Family to assist. Traditional, right?
Moira did a bit of fine tuning on the guitar. She was wearing the black dress and the cameo brooch containing the stained plaid fragment that was reputed to have been recovered from a corpse at Culloden. Credibility. 'This song… You may not know the title, most of you, but the tune could be slightly familiar. It's… the lament of a girl whose man's gone missing at sea and she waits on the shore accosting all the homecoming fishermen as they reach land.
The song's called 'Cam Ye O'er Frae Campbelltoon'. It's, er,… it's traditional.'
Traditional my arse. Me and Kenny Savage wrote it, still half-pissed, at a party in Kenny's flat in 1982 – like, Hey, I know… how about we invent a totally traditional Celtic lament…
She told them, the assembled Celts, 'The chorus is very simple… so feel free to join in…'
And, by Christ, they did join in. Probably with tears in their eyes. All these Scots and Irish and Welsh and Bretons and the folk from the wee place up against Turkey… writers and poets and politicians united in harmony with a phoney chorus composed amidst empty Yugoslav Riesling bottles at the fag end of Kenny Savage's Decree Absolute party in dawn-streaked Stranraer.
What a sham, eh? I mean, what am I doing here?
And Matt Castle dying.
Tears in her own eyes now. Last year he'd told her on the phone that he'd be OK, the tests had shown it wasn't malignant. And she'd believed him; so much for intuition.
The damn tears would be glinting in the soft spotlight they'd put on her, and the Celtic horde out there, maudlin with malt, would think she was weeping for the girl on the shore at Stranraer – and weeping also, naturally, for the plight of Scotland and for the oldest race in Europe trampled into the mud of ages.
'Thank you,' she said graciously, as they applauded not so much her as themselves, a confusion of racial pride with communal self-pity.
And that makes it nine songs, over an hour gone, corning up to 10.30. Time to wind this thing up, yeh? Lifting the guitar strap out of her hair. Let's get the hell out of here.
At which point someone called out smoothly, 'Would it be in order to request an encore?'
She tried to smile.
'Maybe you could play 'The Comb Song'?'
It was him. It would have to be. The New York supplier of Semtex money to the IRA.
'Aw, that's just a kiddies' song.' Standing up, the guitar-strap half-off.
'Well, I don't know about the other people here,' the voice said – and it was not the American, 'but it's the
