Chasing Angels (34 page)

As she spoke, Jessie was retrieving an antiseptic wipe from her bag and carefully cleaning both hands, then a fresh pair of gloves was produced, the ‘soiled’ ones being put in the
plastic bag that the fresh ones had come in. Kathy wondered where it stopped. Was the inside of the bag routinely disinfected to prevent germs from being transferred from ‘soiled’ items
to clean ones? And what about the outside of the bag? Was there a point at which the germs invaded the inside, and where exactly in Jessie’s mind was that point? And, come to that, how did
she reconcile the possible cross-contamination caused by the packaging her various bits and pieces came in? ‘Look,’ said Jessie, ‘Ah’ll needtae get hame an’ lie doon,
this’s knocked hell oota me. Drive us hame, Harry, son. Ye’ll needtae spend the night at oor hoose, Kathy, hen, an’ Hari-Kari here’ll run ye tae the station in the
mornin’.’

She couldn’t remember the interior of Jessie’s house. The only time she had ever seen it before was on a fleeting visit with her mother when she was a child, and the overwhelming
impression of the outside had been of neat gardens and respectable, net-curtained windows. Going inside was like entering a fairy grotto, with glass animals all over the place, obviously an
obsession of Jessie’s, and china figurines of women in long dresses, with names like Rosemary and Daisy. She’d seen them in the display cabinets of numerous china shops, dainty,
brightly coloured figures, flying kites, sitting on swings, skating, all with beautifully pure, wholesome smiles on their delicate, polished faces. Each new one on the market had a long waiting
list of customers anxious to add it to their collection and, by the look of the place, Jessie hadn’t missed one. The house smelt of polish and disinfectant, and nothing was out of place.
Kathy could imagine it remaining just like this for ever, the various ornament collections being moved only to dust underneath and then replaced on the same spot, at the exact angle that Jessie had
predetermined God knew how many years ago. The colour scheme was predominantly white and pink throughout. Pristine and clean, that was the only way to describe it, and unlived in somehow, a bit
like a showhouse. In the sitting room, cushions had been arranged just so on the plastic-covered deep-pink sofa and two armchairs, which in turn had also been arranged just so on the
deep-pink-carpeted floor. The effect was so perfect that it seemed an affront to enter the room, never mind sit on the chairs. The TV was hidden behind the double doors of a mock-Regency cabinet,
and the shell-pink vertical blinds at the windows, like every other window in the house, were accompanied by shell-pink nets, as a backup, Kathy mused, just in case some passer-by should develop
the ability to look through the gaps in the blinds. The kitchen had a distinct 1950s feel, the units were all white, the floor white-tiled with tiny black diamonds where the corners of the tiles
met. Here and there about the room were touches of red-and-white gingham, giving the illusion of pink, and nothing looked as though it had ever been used. The downstairs bathroom, she was told on
arrival, was Jessie’s alone; she couldn’t use a bathroom anyone else used. It too was pink and had undoubtedly been installed straight from the factory. Just in case she should be
caught short while upstairs, she had an identical en suite bathroom in her bedroom. Kathy was free to use the big upstairs bathroom, but she must not use the others; that was Jessie’s
absolute rule. Kathy wondered what catastrophe would befall Jessie’s sanitised universe if she did. She would sleep in the bedroom that had belonged to Claire, her beautiful, thick cousin,
but first she would be required to remove her shoes and leave them at the front door. This was said by Jessie with some distaste, as though she had fully expected Kathy to have known this and was
now justifiably upset that it had had to be mentioned. A new pair of sock slippers, pink, were produced from a cellophane packet and given to her for the duration of her stay, after which, she
surmised, they would be ritually burned in the back garden.

Sitting on the sofa in the sitting room was more of a challenge than Kathy could have anticipated, because she slid all over the plastic covers. She looked across at Jessie in one of the
armchairs, seemingly at ease, and guessed it must be something to do with the fact that she weighed about as much as a tea leaf. There was nothing of her; she looked like an animated skeleton, and
once again there was that curious attempt not to exist by twisting her legs around each other till they almost seemed to merge. Her thin arms were crossed tightly over her chest, another attempt to
take up as little space as possible, or maybe to ensure that she touched as little of the surrounding environment as possible, and one gloved hand reached up bearing the ubiquitous hankie over her
nose and mouth. No wonder Harry had gone quietly insane, she thought, living in this mausoleum, with this mentally disturbed woman who would not allow contact with an endless list of dangerous
items that existed only in her own head. How would he know if he had transgressed and therefore exposed his mother to murderous bacteria, if he didn’t know what was and wasn’t on her
highly personal list? The only way he would know, Kathy realised, was to himself become as demented as Jessie. Was that, she wondered sadly, why he had lost all his early promise and why he had
retreated into his mystic world? Maybe it would’ve been better if Claire had been the one left behind to care for Jessie, because Claire had neither imagination nor intelligence, whereas
Harry had been blessed with both, so where was there for him to go in this insane situation but into a slightly insane state of his own?

‘So,’ said the voice behind the hankie – she must keep an enormous supply of new hankies about the place – ‘ye say ye don’t need the cash. Whit dae ye dae,
like,’ a bony hand reached out in a vague motion, ‘up there?’

‘Ah work in the Tourist Centre,’ Kathy replied. ‘Started off in the tearoom, then moved on tae bein’ a guide.’

‘An’ ye
like
that?’ Jessie asked, bemused.

‘Aye, it’s good fun,’ Kathy said.

‘It canny bring ye in that much, though, surely?’

‘Well, Ah, um.’ How was she to say it? ‘I write a bit as well.’

‘
Write
?’ Such was Jessie’s amazement that Kathy wondered if she had inadvertently told her she water-skied naked behind an elephant. ‘Whit dae ye mean
write
?’

‘Stories an’ things,’ Kathy said uncertainly.

‘
Stories an’ things?
’ Clearly she had muddied the waters still further. ‘An’ there’s money in that, is there?’ Jessie asked.

‘Aye,’ Kathy replied, feeling about an inch tall.

‘Well, whit kinda thing dae ye write aboot?’

God, couldn’t she just let it drop? ‘I write wee stories for women’s magazines,’ she explained, ‘and Ah write romantic books.’

‘Like Mills & Boon?’ Jessie demanded. ‘That kinda thing?’

‘Aye,’ Kathy smiled. ‘That kinda thing.’

There was a silence while Jessie mulled this over. ‘Whit name dae ye write under?’ she asked eventually.

‘Lillian—’

‘No’ Lillian Bryson?’ Jessie interrupted.

‘Aye, that’s right! How did ye know that?’

‘You’re Lillian Bryson?’ Jessie laughed. She leapt from her plastic-covered chair, went over to a bureau in the corner, pulled open a drawer and took from it a pile of slim
booklets, each one encased in its own plastic cover. ‘
That
Lillian Bryson?’ she demanded, holding one aloft.

‘Aye,’ Kathy replied quietly, recognising one of her romantic adventures.

The two women stared at each other, shocked by the revelations. Kathy
was
Lillian Bryson, Jessie
read
Lillian Bryson!

‘Ah read these a’ the time!’ Jessie said excitedly. ‘You wrote these?’

Kathy nodded. ‘Aye,’ she said again.

‘But these are good!’ Jessie said. ‘Ah love these! But why did ye call yersel’ Lillian Bryson, well?’

‘Ah just liked the idea o’ my mother’s name on the covers,’ she laughed, ‘an’ the publisher thought Lillian was merr high-class soundin’ than
Lily.’

‘Oh, that’s great, hen!’ Jessie said breathlessly. ‘Yer mammy woulda loved that!’

Watching Jessie’s excitement, Kathy found herself close to tears. She wrote stories for lonely women, tales of romantic love that always triumphed, of beautiful heroines from good
families, living blameless lives and being pursued by handsome heroes with chiselled features and fine intentions. Innocent fantasy, that was what she produced, not literature, fairy tales for
those who yearned for romance. Somehow the fact that Jessie the whore, who lived in a sterile, pink-and-white house and spent her life trying to fend off the dirt that she felt polluted the world,
that deep down Jessie wanted the true love story that she had said she had given up long ago, filled her with pity and sadness. Not for the first time either. There was that other woman, the one
who wrote to her about the fictitious men in her books as though they really existed, the one who had become her penpal without knowing who it was she was writing to. That had taught her a lesson
too.

She had wanted to write all her life, that was her fantasy and, when Angus died, Rory had let her have his typewriter. She still had it, though it had long ago given way to a computer that
frightened the life out of her. If Rory, who was frightened of nothing and no one, hadn’t more or less stood over her, mentally if not always physically, she would dump the computer even now
and go back to doing her writing on Angus’s old typewriter. It wasn’t writing of course, not real writing; she didn’t have the confidence to try, so she had – what was it
Rory called it? Frittered away whatever ability she had, that was it, because she was too afraid to take the risk of finding out if she had any. But that was Rory, he said what he thought. Angus
and Bunty had, he said, raised him with the knowledge that there was nothing he couldn’t do, nowhere he couldn’t go, and so he didn’t understand how it was with other people who
hadn’t had them as parents. The old Major, he said, had recognised in the young Angus a ferocious intelligence cheated of the kind of education it needed, and so, being a decent kind of man,
he had made it possible for Angus to expand his mind. If it hadn’t been for that old Sassenach Angus Macdonald might easily have gone to the bad, because with all legitimate avenues to
learning blocked, all that intelligence would have taken him in some other direction. So Angus got the house and the land, with the beasts to bring in the money, and a wife who had known him well
enough and long enough to understand that he had to go wherever his mind took him. And he had passed his beliefs and his vision on to his son, only the two had very different characters; that had
been the flaw in Angus’s grand design. He had, himself, a naturally kind and gentle personality that saw the differences in others and made allowances for them, while his son saw the same
traits and regarded them as failings. Regarded them and announced them loudly. Rory was his father’s son, but he wasn’t his father. He was talking of Angus’s philosophy of
personal freedom one day, sitting by the fireside in the cottage, when Kathy had remarked that he really didn’t understand, that not everyone had a father like Angus.

‘Dear God, don’t!’ he said.

‘Don’t what?’ Kathy asked.

‘Don’t tell me a sob story about what a hard life you had growing up in the streets of Glasgow, being beaten by a cruel father and all that!’

‘You really are an insensitive pig!’ she said. ‘Ever thought of applying to become a Samaritan?’

Rory didn’t mean to be insensitive, but he was, and he couldn’t understand why others took offence. He had no time for small talk or social niceties, he had been raised to be honest
and he expected others to be just as honest as he was himself, whereas Angus had taken care not to hurt people’s feelings. And Rory’s honest opinion of her writing was that she lacked
courage. He was the only one, apart from Kathy herself and her publisher, who knew she was Lillian Bryson, and he openly disparaged her for it, finding it impossible to understand why she wasted
her time on ‘this trash’, as he called it. Wouldn’t it be better to try, even if she failed, than to go on churning out this lightweight drivel? Her head knew he was right, but
she had never listened to her head, and there were compensations, little incidents that bolstered her position, if only temporarily. Like her penpal, Ishbel Smith. Miss Smith had been a lady of
more than seventy when their correspondence began, right back at the emergence of Lillian. Miss Smith had been manageress at William Hodge’s, a Glasgow printing firm where calendars were
produced in great numbers, she even sent Lillian one as a sample, though it was by then many years out of date. Kathy hadn’t expected to see those damned white Scotties in tartan tammies ever
again. Miss Smith, or Ishbel, as she had gradually become, had a staff of many women and girls under her control and, now that she was older and wiser, she knew that she had often been hard on
them. She hadn’t realised it at the time and she greatly regretted it in later years, but it was too late to make amends. The reason and, furthermore, a reason she had never divulged to
another living soul outside her family and friends of the time, was that she had lost Bruce, her one true love, in the Second World War. Ishbel had been eighteen and Bruce twenty-two, and they had
intended marrying when he came home on leave after Dunkirk, only Bruce didn’t come back from Dunkirk. It had taken her a long time to stop waiting for him, to let her dreams of the life they
would share vanish in the cold light of day. The shock had caused her hair to fall out, it seemed, and it had never regrown, so even had she felt like loving again, who would’ve taken her? It
had made her bitter, Ishbel confessed, seeing all those other women marrying and having children, and then their children doing the same and, she was ashamed to say, she had taken it out on them.
‘
There you are, Kathy Kelly
,’ Lillian said to her. ‘
You never considered that, did you? You never stopped to wonder how the auld biddy had got like that, did
you?
’ She recalled the day she had walked out of Hodge’s for the last time, having emptied a pot of thick, brown glue over Miss Smith. She had watched her reach up to protect her
always neat hair and was shocked, but not displeased, when it came away in the older woman’s hands. Until that moment she hadn’t suspected that Miss Smith wore a wig, and even when she
found out, she had felt no pity. Miss Smith had goaded and abused her, as she had done all the other women who’d worked in Hodge’s, but poor old Miss Smith had her reasons after all. It
was Kathy’s penance to keep up the correspondence without letting Miss Smith know who she really was, and how could the old woman ever have suspected? This Lillian Bryson she wrote to had
some psychic connection with her and her Bruce, because all the heroes in Lillian’s books were Bruce to the life. It brought their romance back so vividly that it was almost like seeing him
again, she wrote, and she would always be grateful to Lillian for that.