‘Of course I am, Prentice,’ he nodded slowly. Uncle Hamish is balding, but of the school that believes long wisps of hair grown on one side of the head and then combed delicately across the pate to the other edge look better than naked skin exposed to the elements. I watched the coloured light from the stained glass window slide over shiny skin and hardly less luminescent oiled hair, and thought what a prat he looked. I inadvertently found myself humming the appropriate piece of music from the Hamlet cigar adds and thinking of Gregor Fisher.
‘Will you join me in worship this evening, Prentice?’
Oh shit, I thought. ‘Perhaps not, actually, uncle,’ I said, in tones I hoped sounded regretful. ‘Have to pop down the Jac to talk to a girl about a jacuzzi. Probably go straight from here.’ Another lie.
Uncle Hamish looked at me, the grain-like lines on his forehead bunching and tangling, his brown eyes like knots. ‘A jacuzzi, Prentice?’ He pronounced the word the way the lead in a Jacobean tragedy might pronounce the name of the character who has been his nemesis.
‘Yes. A jacuzzi.’
‘That’s a form of bath, isn’t it?’
‘It is.’
‘Not meeting this young lady in a bath, are you, Prentice?’ Uncle Hamish’s lips twisted slowly into what was probably meant to be a smile.
‘I don’t believe the facilities of the Jacobite Bar run to such a thing, uncle,’ I told him. ‘They’ve only recently got round to installing hot water in the gents. The relevant jacuzzi is in Berlin.’
‘The German city?’
I thought about this. Could I have mis-heard Ash and she have been talking about the briefly famous chart-topping band of the same name? I thought not. ‘Yes, uncle; the city. Where the wall was.’
‘I see,’ Uncle Hamish nodded. ‘Berlin.’ He stared up at the violently clashing leaden imagery of the great stained-glass window. ‘Isn’t that where Ilsa is?’
I frowned. ‘Aunt Ilsa? No, she’s in Patagonia, isn’t she? Incommunicado.’
Uncle Hamish looked suitably confused as he contemplated the garish gable glass. Then he nodded. ‘Ah yes. Of course.’ He looked back down at me. ‘However. Shall we see you for supper, Prentice?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘Just as likely to end up with a kebab, I imagine. Or a fish supper.’
‘Well, you have your key with you?’
‘Oh yes. Thanks. And I’ll be ... you know; quiet, when I come in.’
‘Right.’ Uncle Hamish gazed back up at the crass glass. ‘Right. We’ll probably be off in a half-hour or so; let us know if you do want a lift.’
‘Surely.’
‘Right you are, then.’ Uncle Hamish nodded, turned, then looked back with an intensely puzzled expression. ‘Did I hear somebody say mother exploded?’
I nodded. ‘Pacemaker. That’s what Doctor Fyfe was rushing to tell us; told dad in the ambulance. But it was too late by then, of course.’
Uncle Hamish looked more baffled than ever, but nodded eventually and said, ‘Of course,’ and walked off over the parquet with a startlingly tree-like creaking noise which I realised - with a small but welcome surprise - was issuing from his black brogues.
I made straight for the sideboard with the drinks, but a quick inspection of the casement of the relevant window on my way there revealed that Verity the Comely had gone.
Fortingall is a modest hamlet in the hills north of Loch Tay, and it was there in the winter of 1969 that my Aunt Charlotte was determined to consummate her marriage. Specifically, she wanted to be impregnated beneath the ancient yew tree that lies in an enclosure within the graveyard of the small church there; she was convinced that the tree - two thousand years old, according to reliable estimates - must be suffused with a magical Life Force.
It was a dark and stormy night (no; really), the grass under the ancient, straggling, gnarled yew was sodden, and so she and her husband, Steve, had to settle for a knee-trembler while Charlotte held onto one of the overhanging boughs, but it was there and then - despite the effects of gravity - that the gracile and quiveringly prepossessing Verity was conceived, one loud night under an ink black sky obscuring a white full moon, at an hour when all decent folk were in their beds and even the indecent ones were in somebody’s, in a quaint little Perthshire village, back in the fag end of the dear old daft old hippy days.
So my aunt says, and frankly I believe her; anybody wacko enough ever to have bought the idea that there