Wait Till I Tell You by Candia McWilliam Page A

months off.’ No, Catriona thought, it was not that, she had to acknowledge it; it was more likely something to do with the way you did things having to change if you lived in a part of the world where tying up daffodils was not just a thing you might as well do because you’d seen it done but a thing it was better never to omit doing.
    Fergus was sitting on the ground now, by the coffee table, propped up by cushions. He had pink all around his lips, perhaps from some jam off Dougan the Muscovy’s piece, which seemed to be broken up on the floor indoors, though the duck itself was to be seen eating up its snack on the lawn moving its neck, like a typing finger, again and again, at the sticky white bread.
    Alice, big and content, independent and annoyingly incurious about the life Catriona was leading now, that is the life Alice had once led too, was busy in the kitchen chopping, rocking a knife in a pile of parsley on a board. There was a smell of new coffee and mowing. It irked Catriona that she would have to move into the kitchen to talk to Alice. In that room, so securely Alice’s own, she would have to be a visitor, to take whatever conversation Alice considered suitable to her marital kitchen. Apart from Fraser, Alice no longer discussed men, as if the plurality in the noun might imply some wide-ranging sampling on her part that might offend the curtains, spill the water in a blush over the rosy tablecloth. The new, absorbing, potentially plural tribe in her life was babies, whose activities, reactions, characteristics, differences and needs were now of that relevance those of men had been.
    Alice reached for two onions, tore off the skins with the noise of a cheap brown envelope being forced, and chopped them with the maddening efficacious calm that she seemed to have discovered for herself. She pushed the onion, chopped and weepy, to one side with the flat of the knife, and took out a patty of what looked like pink clay, socking it into a pyrex bowl and adding two eggs, the parsley, the onion, and a brusque grind of pepper.
    ‘More coffee, Cat?’ she said. In the old days, when they’d had a clash of mood or taste or will, Alice had been nervous that it was always she who offended her friend, and had spent hours padding up to her afterwards to check if she could make things better, in this way giving Catriona the opportunity to keep her unhappy and docile for a good while after, not relenting till she had negotiated at least one practical advantage, a lend of Alice’s grey silk stockings, or a go of her perfume, maybe even a whole evening of using it right out of her own handbag, at a restaurant or in the cinema.
    ‘That’s a delicious scent’ her companion might say.
    ‘My stepmother brings it me from Paris. It’s made up by a Russian,’ Catriona would say, in the very words Alice used when offered the same compliments. She never felt like a liar then, just as later today, in a restaurant, she would not feel badly when she told Fordyce how she had that afternoon at her people’s place in the country cooked a parsley, pork sausagemeat and onion stuffing for a duck that earlier in the day she had seen eat a jam sandwich, after ringing a bell for it.
    Fergus sucked on at the heel of Catriona’s candied-rose pink suede shoe, pulling the colour out of it slowly and stertorously, with his milky circling lips, till it was losing colour like a frozen raspberry lolly, all its seductive pink going down the throat of the voracious puller at the ice.

Writing on Buildings
    Pushing out from the shingle in the wooden boat, Bill called to the dog, twice, ‘Shona, Shona!’
    Shona ran to and fro on the pebbles. Bill heard her nails tap and skid.
    ‘Come on, girl, come on now.’ Shona was a black collie with a bit of Jack Russell in her. She liked water and hated boats.
    Soon she was swimming alongside, when she saw Bill would not abandon his oars.
    ‘Too late now, girl,’ said Bill. ‘You get along in and go