Ice Dancing Episode 16

TSometimes Mary’s stupidity made me want to scream out loud and assault her with anything to hand

he duo struck up again and Tim asked me to dance. He’s a terrible dancer but very enthusiastic, and just as we were lurching round the floor, I noticed Joe Napier standing by the bar, holding a bottle of beer.

My first thought was that Fiona would be disappointed. If she had known he was going to be here, she might have come too, but she had refused her invitation and was spending the night with a school friend. Joe was wearing tight black jeans and a dark blue cotton shirt, open at the neck. He fitted in well with the other cowboys at the bar.

“There’s your new neighbour!” Tim bellowed in my ear.

“So I see. I wonder what he’s doing here.” “Betty got talking to him in the shop and asked him. I think she’s taken quite a fancy to him.”

“Betty has?”

“And Maisie Murtagh. She can’t see beyond him.”

Maisie was Betty’s best friend, a little square woman who, summer and winter alike, wore woolly tights, a belted coat with a stripy, furry collar that matched her hair, that was also stripy grey and blonde like the pelt of some strange animal, and furry brown zip-up boots on her fat little feet.

She usually wore a striped woolly hat too. She had worn the same hat, to my certain knowledge, for the past 20 years. She was sitting at what passed for a top table with Betty and the family.

They had started school together, the old one-roomed village school that had been turned into a private house some years ago.

For once, she seemed to have abandoned the coat and boots in favour of a green dress and a pair of green satin dancing shoes with a diamante clasp on each toe. Her whole outfit could fairly be described as “vintage”. The clothes made her look like a character from a TV costume drama. All Creatures Great and Small perhaps. She must have had the hat surgically removed, specially for the occasion.

“She made him a cake,” Tim yelled in my ear.

“Who did? Betty?”

“No. Maisie. And a tin of shortbread.” “Where did you hear all this?”

“In the pub.”

“You don’t go to the pub.”

“I was in there the other day. With a mate from work.”

“Ah’ ”

“Your new neighbour was in there too. There was a piece in the paper about him. He was embarrassed about it.”

“Was he?”

I felt disproportionately pleased to see Joe. That should have told me something as well, shouldn’t it? But when something unexpected happens, we don’t always recognise it for what it is. Especially when it seems impossible.

He was standing at the bar with his bottle of beer, talking to Charlie and his pals, and he never even glanced in my direction. When the dance finished, the duo went off for a little break, so that meant we could hold a decent conversation again. With the usual sinking feeling, I saw Mary Black coming over to our table.

Mary was married to Morris, and was one of Sandy’s great multitude of distant cousins. She was younger than Sandy, and he had known her all her life.

She was tall and quite pretty, but absolutely everything about her irritated me, even her face and the way she talked.

This was probably my fault rather than hers, but I couldn’t help it. Her father was a pillar of the kirk in the old fashioned way, and Mary disapproved of all kinds of things: gambling, drinking, smoking, kids kissing in the street, make-up. You name it, Mary was ready to get up a campaign against it. The trouble was that when you spoke to her for more than two minutes, you realised that her morality barely disguised the fact that she was as thick as two short planks. She came out with these stupid statements and you thought, “Where did that come from?”

Or as Annie said, “Lights on, nobody home, Helen.” But Sandy was very fond of her. So I had to put up with her.

Mary sat down opposite me with her ginger beer and lime. I offered to get her something stronger, but she shook her head.

“No, no. I’m driving. But in any case you know me. I never drink much,” she said.

Why did that infuriate me so much when if anyone else had said it, it would have seemed like a perfectly reasonable statement? It was clear that she just wanted to interrogate me about our new neighbour.

“Have you met him?”

“We’ve passed the time of day, Mary.” “Looks a bit of a scruff to me.”

“I don’t know much about him.”

“Is he staying long?”

“He hasn’t said. But I think he’s going to be working here.”

“Are you sure he isn’t a squatter? How do you know he’s who he says he is?”

“Mary, take my word for it, he’s Louise’s cousin. The solicitor knew all about him. And as far as I know he’s here for the whole winter.”

“Oh well, if you say so.”

“He’s Canadian. He wouldn’t have come all the way from Canada just to squat in Louise’s cottage. Would he?”

“Well that’s no indication of anything, is it? I’d phone the solicitor if I were you.”

Sometimes Mary’s stupidity made me want to scream out loud and assault her with anything to hand. My fingers itched to close around a nearby vase of pink carnations and beat her over the head with it. I sat on my hands.

“Mary, he’s got the key. Take my word for it. He isn’t a squatter. He’s working here. Didn’t you see the article?”

“Morris said there was something in the paper. But I don’t hold with ice hockey.” “Why not?”

“Dreadful foreign sport. Morris says they fight each other you know,” she sniffed disparagingly. “Not like football.”

There were so many potential replies to that one that I just shrugged, overcome by a feeling of irritation so profound that it rendered me speechless.

“Not sure I’d like him living down the road from me, anyway. Where does he come from?”

“Ontario, I think. Somewhere near a lake.” It struck me that I was sounding as stupid as Mary. “But we haven’t talked very much. Honestly.”

“Do you think he’s just gatecrashed? Do you think I ought to get Charlie to throw him out?”

“Don’t be daft, Mary. Betty asked him.” Annie had finally come to my rescue. “Betty?”

“Yes. She and Maisie think he’s a nice boy.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It’s true,” I agreed. “And he hasn’t misbehaved himself yet. All he’s done is stand there peacefully with a bottle of beer and laugh at Charlie’s terrible jokes.”

They were terrible as well. They were the most boring jokes in the history of the world, but he fancied himself as a comedian and he would bombard you with one awful, unfunny story after another, until your eyes glazed over and all you wanted to do was curl up in a corner and die. Why is it only men of a certain age who can do that and think you might be remotely entertained by it? Don’t they ever notice all those mouths stretched in thinly disguised yawns?

We were spared further irritation by the band who struck up again. At least the noise would shut Mary up. More tomorrow.