‘I call them Laurel and Hardy,’ I told her.
Doris bent her head, and murmured, ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’
If you’d really been awake you would have seen that one coming.
I don’t know why she’d changed her mind, but things were looking up, weren’t they?
Some time later she asked me, ‘When does our little soldier come to attention again?’
I’ve never been comfortable with grown women using baby talk, and I wasn’t all that chuffed with the word little, so all I asked was, ‘Come again?’
I suppose it was twenty minutes later before I told her, ‘You have a perfect body.’
‘I’ll bet you say that to all the girls, hon.’
‘No. I don’t believe I’ve ever said it before.’
She stopped dressing for a moment and looked at me, her head cocked slightly on one side.
‘That’s nice, Charlie.’
‘Maybe, but I don’t suppose that George is going to like it, is he?’
‘And I don’t suppose he has to know. Isn’t that what you said? It always comes up, and I thought if I couldn’t avoid it, I’d get it out of the way before he gets here. That way you can save your strength for climbing a mountain.’ She’d made it sound like my fault.
‘You’re really serious about that, aren’t you?’
‘Of course I am, Charlie. Wouldn’t you be if your baby brother had died up there?’
She knew it was a lie. I knew it was a lie. She knew I knew it was a lie. I knew she knew I knew it was a lie. What were these bastards up to?
‘Let’s go find a car lot,’ she told me, ‘and buy us a limo.’
Chapter Five
Faster Than a Speeding Bullet
Some of you will remember the old Ford Popular, and some won’t.
I have run this over in my mind quite a few times since then, but you simply can’t describe a black upright Ford Pop as a limo. It’s an unsprung rear-wheel-drive van, with a car’s body shell. We bought one for a hundred and ten quid. It looked as if it had seen better days. There were pieces of straw in the cabin, and its spare tyre sat on the back seat. I recognized the smell of chickens inside it. I once lived six months on a chicken farm: there’s not much I don’t know about chickens. The owner of Loch Linnhe Autos was a tall spare man with thinning hair. His eyes were lost in worry lines. He threw in a full tank of petrol and a can of Castrol and insisted on shaking both our hands and giving us a printed Bible tract before we drove away.
I think he felt guilty at selling us such a clunker, but didn’t want to say so. I parked it in the rear hotel car park – the Thimble had made me hide it around the back because it wasn’t a good advertisement for the place. Doris dug her fingers into my left knee as we drew up, and laughed.
I asked her, ‘What are you laughing at?’
‘George won’t like it,’ she said, and chortled again. Bugger George. Then she asked me, ‘Will he catch up today?’
‘No. He can’t get here until tomorrow at the earliest.’
‘Good.’ As we walked up the rather grand but tatty staircase she took my arm, and said, ‘My appetite’s come back. It must be all this Highland air.’
But she was the best. In every man’s life there has to be one. Her bed was twice the size of mine: the covering on it was a deep crimson, and the scattering of cushions red. When I kissed her belly it was so flat and taut, it was as if my lips had touched the stretched skin of a drum. I could have beaten out a drum roll, or a tattoo, on it with my fingers.
If I thought fleetingly of Flaming June, it was only to wonder who she was with.
We paid off the hotel the next morning. The Thimble stood on the steps to watch us go: she wanted to be certain she had seen the back of us. I’m sure she was tut-tutting, and shaking her head as we drove away.
George, however, did not alight from the train. Doris shrugged, and said, ‘We’d better get going then.’
‘What about your husband?’
‘Oh, hell, Charlie, he’s not my husband.’
‘Your brother, right? Uncle? Third cousin?’
‘How d’ye guess?’
‘I didn’t. I made it up, just like you.’
She did the cock-the-head-to-one-side trick again.
‘You’re cute, Charlie. D’ye know that?’
When the Yanks say cute they don’t mean appealing; they mean something else.
Doris was in the mood to issue orders, ‘C’mon, let’s find the car.’
It rained. The drive took me two wrong turnings, and four and a half hours. The Ford leaked, and leapt potholes in the road like a demented antelope. Doris slept on the back seat. Or tried to. When I suggested she read the map for me she just laughed, and shut her eyes again. You don’t keep a dog and bark yourself.
I went back to that lodge hotel at Shieldaig a few years ago – I was doing a tour of the places I’d known before I sat down to write about them. It doesn’t look any different now, although it’s easier to get there. The roads are better, and so are the cars.
It’s a red sandstone rectangular building. Edwardian maybe, or Victorian. It looks down a sea loch fenced with mountains. I’ll swear the boats bobbing at anchor or tied up at its jetty are the same boats I first saw in 1956.
I pulled into its driveway and stopped the car with a lurch. That woke Doris up. She stretched. I turned back to watch her stretching. She liked that, smiled, and did it again. I liked that too.
