say that it wants attention? It’ll not be sure it wants a sandwich. It might want some duck food or something. It might just like the noise of the bell. It’ll just be used to your thinking it wants a sandwich. It’s come to link the bell with a sandwich, or so you think, but maybe it’s trying to ask for something different.’
‘You think it just eats the sandwich out of good manners?’ said Alice. ‘Like you with that telephone call.’
‘Eh?’ Catriona couldn’t see this link. She would have before Alice had had Fergus. Was it not that the obtuseness more usually settled on the one who had a baby, not her successful friend? So the magazines said.
‘Well, you went to the bell of the phone and accepted a night out.’
‘That doesn’t make me the Muscovy duck.’
‘No it’s him that’s the Muscovy duck. He’s the Muscovy duck, whoever he is.’
‘How d’you know it was a he? Can you sex phone calls now you’re so one with nature?’
‘Easier than poultry, yes I can. So can you. You were styling your hair at him down the phone, Cat.’
‘So why’s he a Muscovy duck?’ asked Catriona, not yet understanding, but suspecting that she was in some category now in Alice’s mind, as, undoubtedly, Alice was in hers.
‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ said Alice baldly, putting Fergus into his netted lobster pot and going to butter the duck’s piece for him. She did one for the wee boy at the same time. Marmite for Fergus, jam for the Muscovy. The duck would do the bread more justice, but Alice could eat Fergus’s bread when he’d mumbled it a bit. He was a big baby and solids weren’t that far off. She wished she could talk to Catriona about this. They had dissected the minutiae of the timings of courtship – when to let him do this or that, when to start calling him, all that – but had not yet been into the delectable curricula of its consequences, weaning, possetting, bottling, burping, changing.
Catriona had kept her face angry for some time after Alice had made her devastatingly stupid comment about the man who’d rung her, Fordyce Succoth from Dysart Graphics, being like that daft Muscovy duck. It was Alice and Fraser’s having moved out here to the sticks that made Alice say these things, she’d nothing to keep her on the ball. She was so dopey with the caretaking of the castle garden, the green fields of grass and sea – and the wean and the coastal views, Catriona thought angrily, that she couldn’t even see when a person was insulted. ‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ indeed, she’d tell Fordyce that later when they were better acquainted. She thought of Fordyce very carefully, leaving off some of the things about him like the holes behind his layered hair on the neck, where the acne had got him, and the way he drove with the backs of his hands laid on the thick thighs of his lower half. The car though was a superb machine, and Fordyce’s work at Dysart Graphics very challenging, Catriona reminded herself. Any road, she thought, I can’t cancel on him now.
For she had begun to think of the skin on the back of his neck, its pitted, red, angry texture pierced here and there by thin bore holes that looked as they could take a wire right in to the body. The skin was like something she would not translate into words from the picture in her head. Dougan the Muscovy duck’s shiny rough bill roofed with pustules, his two dry duck nostrils came into Catriona’s mind and she got more angry. How could Alice ruin her relationship like this? Was she jealous, stuck out here with Fergus and Fraser, one of them saying nothing at all in the house all day, the other doing the same outdoors?
There Fraser was, for example, tying knots in daffodils all morning. Why was that? Was he trying to remember a whole lot of things? ‘Oh deary me, I must remember Alice’s birthday. Let me see now, I’ll just tie back this clump of daffs. Then there’s Fergus’s. Can’t be more than seven
‘You think it just eats the sandwich out of good manners?’ said Alice. ‘Like you with that telephone call.’
‘Eh?’ Catriona couldn’t see this link. She would have before Alice had had Fergus. Was it not that the obtuseness more usually settled on the one who had a baby, not her successful friend? So the magazines said.
‘Well, you went to the bell of the phone and accepted a night out.’
‘That doesn’t make me the Muscovy duck.’
‘No it’s him that’s the Muscovy duck. He’s the Muscovy duck, whoever he is.’
‘How d’you know it was a he? Can you sex phone calls now you’re so one with nature?’
‘Easier than poultry, yes I can. So can you. You were styling your hair at him down the phone, Cat.’
‘So why’s he a Muscovy duck?’ asked Catriona, not yet understanding, but suspecting that she was in some category now in Alice’s mind, as, undoubtedly, Alice was in hers.
‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ said Alice baldly, putting Fergus into his netted lobster pot and going to butter the duck’s piece for him. She did one for the wee boy at the same time. Marmite for Fergus, jam for the Muscovy. The duck would do the bread more justice, but Alice could eat Fergus’s bread when he’d mumbled it a bit. He was a big baby and solids weren’t that far off. She wished she could talk to Catriona about this. They had dissected the minutiae of the timings of courtship – when to let him do this or that, when to start calling him, all that – but had not yet been into the delectable curricula of its consequences, weaning, possetting, bottling, burping, changing.
Catriona had kept her face angry for some time after Alice had made her devastatingly stupid comment about the man who’d rung her, Fordyce Succoth from Dysart Graphics, being like that daft Muscovy duck. It was Alice and Fraser’s having moved out here to the sticks that made Alice say these things, she’d nothing to keep her on the ball. She was so dopey with the caretaking of the castle garden, the green fields of grass and sea – and the wean and the coastal views, Catriona thought angrily, that she couldn’t even see when a person was insulted. ‘Rings a bell and gets a treat,’ indeed, she’d tell Fordyce that later when they were better acquainted. She thought of Fordyce very carefully, leaving off some of the things about him like the holes behind his layered hair on the neck, where the acne had got him, and the way he drove with the backs of his hands laid on the thick thighs of his lower half. The car though was a superb machine, and Fordyce’s work at Dysart Graphics very challenging, Catriona reminded herself. Any road, she thought, I can’t cancel on him now.
For she had begun to think of the skin on the back of his neck, its pitted, red, angry texture pierced here and there by thin bore holes that looked as they could take a wire right in to the body. The skin was like something she would not translate into words from the picture in her head. Dougan the Muscovy duck’s shiny rough bill roofed with pustules, his two dry duck nostrils came into Catriona’s mind and she got more angry. How could Alice ruin her relationship like this? Was she jealous, stuck out here with Fergus and Fraser, one of them saying nothing at all in the house all day, the other doing the same outdoors?
There Fraser was, for example, tying knots in daffodils all morning. Why was that? Was he trying to remember a whole lot of things? ‘Oh deary me, I must remember Alice’s birthday. Let me see now, I’ll just tie back this clump of daffs. Then there’s Fergus’s. Can’t be more than seven
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