and detailed instructions on how to get by car to the flat I shared in Glasgow).
Grandma Margot pulled up her sleeve to expose her white, darkly spotted right forearm. ‘I have my moles, Prentice. They tell me things.’
I laughed. She looked inscrutable. ‘Sorry, gran?’
She tapped her wrist with one long pale finger; there was a large brown mole there. Her eyes were narrowed. She leaned closer still and tapped the mole again. ‘Not a sausage, Prentice.’
‘Well,’ I said, not sure whether to try another laugh. ‘No.’
‘Not for eight years, not a hint, not a sensation.’ Her voice was low, almost husky. She looked as though she was enjoying herself.
‘I give in, gran; what are you talking about?’
‘My moles, Prentice.’ She arched one eyebrow, then sat back with a sigh in her wheelchair. ‘I can tell what’s going on in this family by my moles. They itch when people are talking about me, or when something ... remarkable is happening to the person.’ She frowned. ‘Well, usually.’ She glared at me, prodded me in the shoulder with her stick. ‘Don’t tell your father about this; he’d have me committed.’
‘Gran! Of course not! And he wouldn’t, anyway!’
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that.’ Her eyes narrowed again.
I leant on one of the chair’s wheels. ‘Let me get this right; your moles itch when one of us is talking about you?’
She nodded, grim. ‘Sometimes they hurt, sometimes they tickle. And they can itch in different ways, too.’
‘And that mole’s Uncle Rory’s?’ I nodded incredulously at the big mole on her right wrist.
‘That’s right,’ she said, tapping the stick on one footrest of the wheelchair. She held up her wrist and fixed the raised brown spot with an accusatory glare. ‘Not a sausage, for eight years.’
I stared at the dormant eruption with a sort of nervous respect, mingled with outright disbelief. ‘Wow,’ I said at last.
‘... survived by her daughter lisa, and sons Kenneth, Hamish and Roderick.’ The good lawyer Blawke had helpfully nodded at my dad and my uncle when he mentioned them. Dad kept on grinding his teeth; Uncle Hamish stopped snoring and gave a little start at the mention of his name; he opened his eyes and looked round - a little wildly, I thought - before relaxing once more. His eyelids started to droop again almost immediately. At the mention of Uncle Rory’s name Mr Blawke looked about the crowded chapel as though expecting Uncle Rory to make a sudden and dramatic appearance. ‘And, sharing, I’m sure, in the family’s grief, the husband of her dear late daughter, Fiona.’ Here Mr Blawke looked very serious, and did indeed grasp his lapels for a moment, as he nodded, gravely, at Uncle Fergus. ‘Mr Urvill,’ Mr Blawke said, completing the nod that had developed pretensions to a bow, I thought, and then clearing his throat. This genuflection completed, the reference to past tragedy duly made, most of the people who had turned to look at Uncle Fergus turned away again.
My head stayed turned.
Uncle Fergus is an interesting enough fellow in himself, and (of course) as Mr Blawke knew to his benefit, probably Gallanach’s richest and certainly its most powerful man. But I wasn’t looking at him.
Beside the thick-necked bulk of the Urvill of Urvill (soberly resplendent in what I assumed was the family’s mourning tartan - blackish purple, blackish green and fairly dark black) sat neither of his two daughters, Diana and Helen - those long-legged visions of money-creamed, honey-skinried, globetrotting loveliness - but instead his niece, the stunning, the fabulous, the golden-haired, vellus-faced, diamond-eyed Verity, upwardly nubile scionette of the house of Urvill, the jewel beside the jowls; the girl who, for me, had put the lectual in intellectual, and phany in epiphany and the ibid in libidinous!
Such bliss to look. I feasted my eyes on that gracefully angular form, just this side of her uncle and sitting quietly in black. She had worn a white quilted skiing jacket outside, but now had taken it off in the unfittingly chilly crematorium, and sat in a black blouse and black skirt, black ... tights? Stockings? My God, the sheer force of joy in just imagining! and black shoes. And shivering! The slick material of the blouse trembling in the light from the translucent panes overhead, black silk hanging in folds of shade from her breasts, quivering! I felt my chest expand and my eyes widen. I was just about to look away, reckoning that I had gazed to the limits of decency,