Wendy followed them down the passage. It certainly was a state, as if it had been half done-up and then abandoned during redecorations. Bits of old carpet and newspaper partly covered the old boards. The phone and the Yellow Pages had been slung in the corner. “Don’t you feel,” the old man called out to Wendy, “when you get off the train that you’re still vibrating and shunting along? I feel like that for a whole day afterwards.”
“I’ve not been on a train before,” said Wendy, and realised it was true.
The flat seemed to smell of veggie burgers, coffee and cigarettes. It seemed to Wendy a funny place for a couple of millionaires to live.
The cousin, Colin, hadn’t said a word yet. He was so skinny and not what she’d expected at all. Aunty Anne hadn’t said much to prepare her, but somehow Wendy had pictured a strapping lad in a polo shirt, hairs sprouting out on his chest.
They were ushered into the kitchen, a bright, stone-flagged room with an old-fashioned range, potted plants resting everywhere and a sloping ceiling. The old man dashed over to the cooker and was busily turning over veggie burgers on the grill. It was like walking into an indoor barbecue: there were already guests at the kitchen table that Wendy didn’t recognise. Aunty Anne was looking daggers at the interlopers.
“Ah,” said Uncle Pat. “These are our downstairs neighbours. Captain Simon, and his captivating sister, Belinda.”
They nodded hellos at the curious couple. Colin was finding them chairs to go round the cluttered table. Belinda was a very fat woman in a candy-striped mini-dress. She had white hair kept back with slides, and very broad, white knees. She shook out a bag of sugar mice onto the table. ‘I’ve been saving these until you came,’ she said, in a very broad, posh-Edinburgh accent, the first that Wendy had heard.
Her brother next to her was in some kind of uniform. “Are you back for long, Anne?” he asked, Aunty Anne, thought, very forwardly.
“We don’t know as yet,” she told him.
Wendy saw her uncle and cousin Colin exchange a look.
Her room was beside the kitchen and so she could hear them talking when she went to bed, or first thing in the morning. Sometimes she lay awake with excitement, full of the idea of herself in a new place.
The girl she’d been would never let herself get het up about a change in circumstances. The girl she used to be would have been sickened. She wasn’t used to excessive enthusiasm. But the moment Uncle Pat had shown her the green spiral staircase up to her own room, she knew this would be different. She had her own space, with walls freshly painted an eggy yellow, and a skylight wider than she could spread her arms. This was directly above her bed and, when she lay staring up, she seemed to be lifted up to the sky. Smashing.
That first morning, when Uncle Pat had showed her to the spiral staircase, just beside the kitchen, he had said: “For as long as you stay with us, this will be yours.” His battered face flushed with pleasure as she tested her feet on the iron rungs. She was starting to warm to him. The skin of his face was shiny like the bottoms of her mother’s old, worn moccasin slippers.
This was the first uncle-y thing that he did for her: showing her this room and saying that it was hers, letting her try it out for herself alone.
She poked her head into the gorgeous yellow of the new room and gasped. She looked down at him again, this foreshortened old man in the crimson silk of his overlarge dressing gown. He gave her a small wave and walked away. He didn’t seem Aunty Anne’s type at all.
Mostly Colin was in charge of Wendy. He knew all about
nothing, he admitted, but he liked lovely days out and Uncle Pat had decided that Wendy would have to learn all about the city on a series of lovely days out. When Colin and Wendy went out alone, they generally ignored the history and legends and the buildings, all the things they ought to pay attention to, and sought out the shops that were so swish they displayed only two or three items in their windows, or the cafes that offered the sickliest looking cakes.
When Uncle Pat came out with them he thought that Wendy would like to hear all his memories of the city. How much it had all changed. How, nowadays, everything was geared to pleasure and he was sure that was a marvellous thing, a positive thing. He talked to Wendy as if she was considering Edinburgh as the place to spend the rest of her life.
One day that first week they had a late, lazy lunch in the Scarlet Empress, Colin’s favourite cafe. They took the window table at the back and looked out at the cramped, green garden.
“Mark you,” said Uncle Pat, “I talk about pleasure, but all the jazz clubs and the cinemas down this end of town appear to have vanished. They’ve whistled off to those multiplex places, haven’t they? People find they like different things, I suppose. They’ve gone off old picture houses, full of honest vulgarity. There was one with long steps, like a draw-bridge down to a hut where you bought your tickets. It was like going up into a castle, the castle where all your dreams played out. They had wooden Corinthian columns that were rotting away inside...” He looked up to see Wendy smiling. “Oh, I feel about a hundred and six explaining this to you. Yet I still feel six years old inside. I
